My immediate goal is to make sure that I'm getting at least 30 minutes of sparring a week. After that, an hour a week is probably the next big goal, hopefully by the end of summer.
They say that one way to really understand something is to measure it, and in the same way that keeping a four-week moving average of training days has helped me understand how my training is progressing over the most relevant timeframes (from month-to-month to year-to-year comparisons), I'm thinking that keeping track of exactly how much time I spend practicing what I both learn and preach will be a similar boon for my development.
I've noticed that a lot of newer guys still shy away from Live Training. It was actually a joke among a few white belts today that Professor Carlos included a Live Training component within the Fundamentals class to "make sure" that guys got at least some Live Training in.
Hopefully my own focus on dramatically increasing the amount of time I spent doing Live Training (while simultaneously being relatively class-agnostic) will also give me an opportunity to coax some of these guys off the sidelines. Ideally, I'd love to train for about 30 minutes three times a week. Assuming I'm not training with one person for the whole half hour, some of these guys would be perfect second and/or third round training partners for me. My hope is that the combination of a flow-oriented roll and the chance to train with a black belt will be temptation enough for some of these newer folks to stick around. Live Training is such a key differentiator for jiu-jitsu that it pains me to see so many people missing out.
