Maybe I'll switch to weekly updates. We'll see. I'm tracking my weight training over at T-Nation, and I'm not sure of the value of tracking my jiu-jitsu classes - though I can think of a few different ways to do it that might be more worthwhile for all involved.
I've been back on the mat and in the gym for about four and a half weeks. Because of work travel, I was off the mat for three weeks, and away from heavy lifting for two. I only missed a week of cardio.
Right now, my cardio is OK. I've backed off doing four sessions of 30-minute LSD treadmill walking after two weeks and have bumped up the pre- and post-jiujitsu conditioning. The pre-training workout is a 9-minute matwork routine (three rounds of 10 sets of 8 reps of different grappling solo drills) and the post-training workout is a 15-minute mashup of HICT and Tempo intervals (five rounds of hipscapes, ab wheel rollouts, hip thrusts, jump squats, tempo pushups).
My heavy lifting is actually going kinda great. I squatted 235 for a triple on Monday, the heaviest squat I've ever done. Today I benched 170 for a triple, which I also think is the heaviest bench press I've ever done. Add to this the fact that I'm doing this on a fat loss diet that has me at my lightest weight since I moved to Seattle in 1999, and you've got one happy prick.
Jiujitsu is another story. Although my four-week attendance average is back up to 2.0 (nothing impressive, but the best I've been able to do since moving to Kent in the fall of 2016 and doubling the travel time between home and the academy), I am not feeling it at all. It's one thing to be fighting to stay ahead. It's quite another to be fighting to keep up. Without putting too fine a point on it, if I can't figure out a way to perform better on the mat, I'm not convinced I'll keep trying.
My last strategy is going to be adding a training day on Sunday. Currently, all I do is help teach (or teach) and Live Train. I never practice and it's starting to show. It's always 100% or nada. And that's not conducive to betterment at all.
So I'm going to spend the next few months getting in some flow training on Sundays and see if that helps patch the hole in this bucket.
