Training Journal 5.31.08

No-gi practice > me.

Morning workout consisted of a light ab circuit in the apartment and some step-ups at the park. Evening practice consisted of me getting torn up in no-gi sparring class. But I’m getting back in there, slowly but surely. I think it’s good to take a solid vacation from training every now and then, but May has been kind of a shitty month for me after the tournament. Here’s to hoping June gets better, anyway.

Leg attacks still make me all jittery. I think it’s probably because I can’t really see what’s going on, and I don’t want to hurt anything. Still, heel hooks, knee bars, toe holds, even straight ankle locks bug me out. I wonder how I’m gonna get over that hump.

pat m.

Training Journal 5.29.08

Back in action, baby! And I got totally whooped. Fuck you, tonsilitis. Fuck you for causing me to lose my conditioning. But it’s good to be back.

pat m.

bleh.

got the flu. not a whole lot of training to be done here.

thanks to babygirl for taking excellent care of me!

pat m.

The Game of Jiu Jitsu

A little over a month or so ago, one of the newer guys (Tashiro-san) was complaining about how it hurt when I had him in knee on stomach – even when we were just drilling a move and I was trying to go as lightly as possible. Amazon heard him complaining – this wasn’t his first time – and said, literally, “your HP is too low, Tashiro. You need to level up.”

Between this and the Street Fighter 2 humming, I’m thinking that Amazon is a bigger gamer than he lets on. But he has a good point: Fighting is a sport, and a sport is a mix of a game and physical activity. Since I also play a lot of video games, including a lot of Street Fighter 2 and its innumerable spinoffs, it’s only natural that I think about MMA as a game. Sometimes, I find, it helps me figure out where I need to improve, and how to make sure I’m playing to win.

I usually start out by thinking of a player first in terms of his or her physical strength – that is, their body’s capacity to do work. Given a fight between two completely untrained cavemen, the one with more physical strength is going to win the fight more often than not. No matter how much some people downplay physical strength while talking about martial arts, the fact is that it’s damn important – important enough for our sports to be segregated by weight class, since we can control for strength to a certain degree as it correlates with bodyweight to make for more even matchups, and thus, more exciting fights. Even the most experienced BJJ players out there will probably remember a time when they felt like they were starting to get the hang of this BJJ thing, and then some new guy who weighed like 100lbs more than they did but didn’t know anything somehow managed to kimura them from inside their own guard. Yeah, not the slickest way to win – and certainly not one that’s going to win you a whole lot of approval by your instructor – but it happens, nevertheless.

What training in the martial arts does is give you a force multiplier for your raw physical strength, by teaching you how to apply your strength in particular ways. If the cavemen fighting from our first example don’t know where to hit each other, they’re going to be fighting for a long, long time. Striking can be renamed “learning how to produce force with certain harder parts of our body to inflict damage on the opponent in certain places”, and submissions can be considered “learning how to leverage our body’s physical strengths against our opponent’s weaker body parts” – e.g. attacking the leg at the joints instead of trying to break the bones, or choking them out instead of trying to crush their lungs at the ribcage. Training can be considered a strength amplifier - while our body is still capable of producing the same amount of force overall, we’ve got a better idea of how to use it more efficiently to prevent ourselves from getting beaten. Thus, while training is important, it’s not the end-all.

What’s more, “leveling up” our physical strength, or our technical ability, tends to be something that follows the law of diminishing returns; while we’ll be a better BJJ player the more we train (not taking into account physical aging, etc. for now, anyway), if we train five days a week every year, we’ll see our net improvement gradually decrease each year. Again, this isn’t to say we’re getting worse, but rather that we learn more in the beginning because there’s more to learn. This comes from personal observation, nothing more, so feel free to chime in if you disagree. Likewise, training strength directly (weight training, etc.) sees dramatic gains in the first few years year or so, but after that the gains taper off dramatically. So if you’re a lifelong gym rat, lay off a bit and spend that time training, and vice versa – if you’re one of those skinny BJJ technicians (i.e. me), take a day off and do some deadlifts – to maximize your time spent.

The “game” comes in when we pit fighters against each other, of course. But it’s not as simple as taking the physical strength and modifying it by the training multiplier, oh no. As they say, styles make fights, and for good reason – the way someone plays the game determines whether their final adjusted strength comes into play at all. To take the early UFCs as a clear cut example, Royce Gracie might have had lower adjusted strength than anyone else in the tournament, but his gameplan put him in positions that gave him specific strength bonuses that helped him win out. That is to say, even though I just generalized “training” as a general “strength amplifier”, the truth is that it’s more complicated than that; we train ways to use our strength in specific situations that give us an advantage and our opponent a disadvantage. Whoever manages to get their opponent in that situation and keep them there long enough to end the fight wins.

Let’s take the basic BJJ positions as an example; we have guard (in all its various incarnations), side control, mount, rear mount, and knee-on-stomach. At my last competition, I generally chose to go to my guard first, because even though it’s considered a neutral position at best, I’ve practiced how to leverage my strength mostly from that position, giving me a bonus there. If my opponent isn’t very good at guard passing and sweep/submission defense, then we could take what originally was an even position (say, five points to five points) and give me +1 and my opponent -1, or 6 to 4. The larger my advantage gets in any particular position, the harder it is for my opponent to win the fight – and the less time and ability they have to redirect the fight into a place that’s at their advantage. And, no doubt, they’ll have to exert more energy to do that, too.

After all, strength is a finite resource – our bodies get tired when we fight. Run out of energy, and you’ll lose, too. But, exert the maximal amount of energy at the right amount of time – being “explosive” – and that might get your opponent in a situation that they just can’t muster up the energy to escape from, like, say, however hundreds of pounds of force needed to perform a bicep curl against an armbar.

I kind of forgot where I was going with this, but now I want to make a collectible card game out of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Hmmm.

pat m.

Thoughts on Instructional DVDs

Instructional DVDs put me to sleep.

For the first 3-4 years of my BJJ/MMA training I never really bothered looking much at instructional DVDs – I wasn’t generally without good instruction and plenty of training partners, so I figured that I was better off focusing on trying out the stuff that we learned in class than worrying about trying to pick stuff out of a DVD, especially since I don’t really have anyone to drill the moves on while I’m watching. For players newer to the sport, this is probably still the best thing to do early on. There is no substitute for a good instructor – not even a killer DVD selection. So get outta here with that “self-training” boshit – there’s a lot that you learn with formal instruction besides just a list of techniques. DVDs alone are better than nothing, I suppose, but that’s not saying much.

Once I came to Japan I started toying around with instructional DVD, for a few reasons. First, they don’t show techniques every day at Alive, and after training long enough at any place you’ll notice a certain amount of repetition in the techniques they teach, especially if you’re going virtually every day. Second, I had to deal with a language barrier, which kept me from understanding some of the finer points of the moves, so I thought DVDs could help supplement. Third, I’ve basically got this time completely set aside to work on my BJJ (well, and “research”…) so I figured that I ought to find things to do when I’m not in practice that could help. Adding instructional DVDs to my training “diet” lets me make the most of my free time, and more importantly, it gives me some control over what I learn. See, learning BJJ in a class environment has its downsides, too; the instructor has to tailor a lesson for multiple skill levels, and it might so happen that the theme of the day/week/month isn’t addressing a tremendous hole in your game that you’d like to patch up. Spending an hour or so with a worthwhile instructional, however, gives you a fairly in-depth, concise look at whatever position it is you want to work on, and the additional benefit of a different instructor’s perspective and experience. I think pretty much any DVD I have that includes the words “sweep” and “guard” in the title includes the butterfly-guard hook sweep in one of the first few techniques shown, but everyone always does it just a little bit differently. Especially once you’re out of the young impressionable white belt years and into the doldrums of blue belt-hood (which is where I’m at right now) it helps to watch someone else do moves and positions you might even already know, just to see the little things they do different. I’ve made three “breakthroughs” in the past few months, and two of them have come from DVDs. Here they are:

1. When on the bottom in half guard, do your best to keep your top leg/knee and hands active enough to prevent you from getting smashed down before you worry about the underhook or anything like that. (Rigan Machado’s half guard DVD)
2. When shooting the triangle from spider guard, emphasize that you just kind of “slip” off their bicep and over their head. I had been making a slightly wasteful movement that made it easier to escape from. (This was with help from Hosokawa-san.)
3. When playing a seated/open guard and looking to move to butterfly guard or X-guard, your first priority is to prevent them from controlling your legs with their hands. If they start trying to do so, you’ll probably want to use your arms AND legs to break those grips and get them where you want them. (Marcelo Garcia’s submission grappling X-guard DVD)

All of those are things that someone could have taught me, sure. But it’s the little details that other people might not notice when they try to help me develop my game, and I might not even know how to ask for, that can make all the difference. If you get lucky, people will help you out – but you might not always be so lucky. In my case, if I had learned those first two bits after the Rickson Gracie Cup, I probably wouldn’t have gotten second, since my wins required a whole lot of half-guard and triangles. This is also the kind of stuff that you can build upon yourself, the small points that just require little adjustments here and there, in how you think more than anything else, and not necessarily something that requires a whole hell of a lot of drilling before you get it down.

Perhaps one of the most rewarding feelings in BJJ is that “I got it!” moment, when things just kind of fall into place for a particular move. Watching Marcelo scoot around on his butt and prevent the other guy from controlling his legs gave me an “I got it!” moment the other day, and as fine a point as it might have been, it made other aspects of my game, like arm drags, considerably more dangerous now that I had a better idea of what I was doing wrong.

But they still put me to sleep. Naptime.

pat m.

Training Journal 5.16.08

I’ve been kind of down in the dumps lately. After taking most of a week off to recover from the tournament, I got back into the full swing of things this week, and it’s left me good and sore, physically and otherwise.

Morning workouts have gone well, at least – I’ve made new innovations in the field of using common household objects as weightlifting gear, that I’ll post on later. The grip workouts feel good, and the protein powder is delicious. ON Chocolate Casein tastes like the milk from a bowl of Cocoa Krispies – mmmmm. No report yet on the creatine, though.

Jiu Jitsu practice is what’s been bugging me lately – I’ve been trying to work more guard passes, sweeps, butterfly/open guard, and stuff that generally doesn’t involve the triangle. I’m having one hell of a time, though. I guess it’s good for me, but it’s kind of disappointing to feel like my progress is stalling. On the plus side, I watched one of Marcelo Garcia’s X-Guard instructionals and it’s given me a little kick-start in the right direction for training today. It’s also gotten me fired up to write a post about the role that instructional DVDs play in one’s BJJ education. But that too is for another day.

Highlight of the day: I hit a slick arm drag -> RNC in no-gi sparring today. Woooooo.

pat m.

Training Journal 5.14.08

Hatsu Hioki told me today I looked like Nick Diaz. Sigh.

Another exhausting day today. In fact, I think Wednesdays tend to be the most exhausting day of the week, because I’ve got a cardio workout in the morning, and kickboxing class/BJJ sparring class in the evening, which are the two most tiring classes Alive offers.

My morning cardio workout was: Plyometric push-ups, jump squats, high knees water-bottle press, and shadow boxing for 30 seconds each, rest for 30 seconds after going through that circuit twice (so 4 minute round, rest, 4 minute round, rest, 4 minute round). Felt good.

Evening classes busted my ass, though. I acquitted myself nicely in kickboxing sparring today, but BJJ just wore me out. I need to start pushing myself to explode again. Worked last time I did it, anyway.

pat m.

Training Journal 5.13.08

It’s been a while since I’ve been this tired. Phew.

Morning workout didn’t go off quite as planned because my hip was still killing me from Niimi-san’s punch last night. I got a light core workout done in the apartment, broke a bit of a sweat, but nothing too substantial.

Amazon taught a few neat techniques that I’m going to try to work into my arsenal, starting from an open guard with both feet on the opponent’s hips. Break their grips on your pants and really stretch them out. If they start to walk back, bring your feet down behind their feet, sit up, and punch forward with both hands (while holding their sleeves) – they should fall backwards, and you should be able to pull yourself up into seated base. If they stay there, you can switch grips and go for that open-guard kick sweep (the one where you’re on your side, you’ve got one hand gripping the opposite-side sleeve, the other hand holding their foot, one leg in their solar plexus and the other sweeps their other foot to kick them over), which in turn transitions nicely into De La Riva guard if they defend, or you can do some crazy elevator-sweep shit like Joachim Hansen vs. Eddie Alvarez.

Looks like I have to go to practice tomorrow so I can translate for some American dude who called up yesterday and can’t speak Japanese. Huh.

pat m.

Supplements ‘n’ Stuff

Look what I got in the mail!

Christmas came early in my apartment.

I’ve toyed with the idea of trying creatine for a while now and figured that the $18/kg price Bodybuilding.com offered it for was low enough that I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot. However, I have to say that while the general consensus seems to be that creatine is pretty awesome, no one seems to agree on how much to take, when to take it, and what to take it with. Pre-workout? Post-workout. Loading phase? Or is that just a scam to try and sell more? Water? Juice. How about in a protein shake? Arg.

I’m going to try taking it in the morning in a cup of green tea, probably just a teaspoon or so. I’ll let you know how it goes.

pat m.

Training Journal, 5.12.08

Back in action, baby.

Annnd getting my ass whooped.

I switched up my morning workout schedule to try and emphasize grip strength and core work. Today was one of the grip days – towel-grip pull-ups (the kind where you roll the towel around the bar), towel-grip dips, towel-grip bodyweight rows, some lunges (more for variety than anything else), isometric towel-grip-pull-up-hold (just hang at the top of a pullup), and a good stretch to finish things off. It’s felt like my strength workouts have plateaued lately, and rather than keep adding reps I’ve decided to make the most of the equipment I have access to, especially since BJJ puts a premium on flexibility, core strength, and grip strength. Hell, I probably should have done this earlier.

Evening training went well. It was good to get back into kickboxing, though I took a kick to the hip that’s still kind of bugging me. BJJ practice saw me roll with plenty of good guys and get submitted by almost all of them. A newish white belt tapped me today with the same gi-choke from back-mount that I’ve lost to in two tournament matches. I need to be more careful about that. Coach says I should work on butterfly guard next, and I agree, though there’s still a little more playing around I want to do with the triangle, too. I think I play less Jiu Jitsu and more Triangle-Jitsu. Trigonometry. Or something.

My next order from Bodybuilding.com should come in soon. The last one introduced me to the world of ON 100% Whey Protein and fish oil supplements, this one will bring me those plus 1kg of creatine monohydrate. I’m interested to see what it does for me. Oh, I’ve been trying out contrast showers lately, too – well, I fill the bath up with cold water, run the shower with hot water, and alternate between the two. Feels good, hopefully speeds up recovery a bit (every little bit helps!) and I guess it’s good for my skin, too.

pat m.