There is nothing like training on a Saturday.
We spent the entire session working on one basic transition from pulling guard to submission. It's hard to describe how nice it was to spend that much time on a single move. There is so often a tension between teaching too few moves and too many in a given session. I think that we've struck a nice balance by using transitions to allow us to work through far more moves in a given session than would otherwise be possible.
Arguably, this is the kind of thing that advanced training is made of. But more and more I'm willing to guess that, at the end of the day, learning is learning, and the most important thing is to set out the task to be apprehended and then get out of the way and let the students work on apprehending it. "Basic" and "advanced" may be far more relevant to the teacher than to the student who is simply waiting to be told what to do.
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My training is increasingly being forged by eager young (and not so young) purple belts. And today was only further example of the same. We have such a strong group of guys working in that "advanced-intermediate" territory, and the fact that so many of them are only a division a way means that they are a great resource for those of us on the smaller end of the scale.
While my technique is certainly being tested by these young guns, mostly what I am learning is efficiency, and keeping the game in a place where I am most comfortable. I'll never be able to keep up the pace - or even the strength in some instances - but there's no age barrier to ever greater accuracy and precision, and nothing to be lost by taking the time to do everything right.
