Welcome to Rocha Jiu Jitsu

So I signed up at Rocha Jiu Jitsu on Monday after checking out the place last Thursday, and was immediately greeted with:

Oof.

Basically, you skip rope while your partner does 5 Turkish Getups on each side. Every time the rope hits your feet, drop and do 10 pushups, then 10 mountain-climbers. This went on for probably about 20 minutes.

Then Eduardo taught us a few half-guard passes from a position I’ve never seen before, where you post your hand by their head, turn to face them, kind of sit up on their hips (while thrusting your hips forward) and then walking your trapped leg forwards. After walking it forwards for a bit, just push on their knee to loosen the pressure a bit, and when they try to reconstitute half guard, kick your shin across their hip/thigh and get the knee out. (Alternately, if they try and get the butterfly hook in, push their knee back and slip your leg forward when they kick.) It’s neat stuff, but it’s stuff I’ve never seen before and it felt a little bit unnatural. I’ll keep trying it, though.

It feels good to be rolling again after a ~2 week long hiatus, and it’s been fun getting used to training with new people. This is the ninth time I’ve started at a new place, so I think I’m fairly used to the switching by now, but it’s always kind of disorienting to get used to my spot in the pecking order at one gym and then realize at a new place that there is a whole new group of people that can whoop my ass. From the looks of it, the guys at RJJ are up at the top in the Bay Area – plenty of competitive success, a strong competitive team, and if Monday was any indication, they don’t fuck around with their conditioning. Plus, practically everyone is bigger than the guys at Alive Academy, which is something I’ve been needing for a while.

It’s good to be back.

pat m.

Hot Link Trifecta

First: my buddy Diego wrote this over at his blog. It’s called “Training in a Time-Starved World” and it’s a good bit about prioritizing training.

Second: I wrote a piece on Japanese Pro Wrestling (puroresu) over at Giant Realm. It’s called “Sweaty Guys In Spandex Go International” which is going to get me some awesome spam comments over here. Check it out and post a comment!

Third: I ate a hot link yesterday, and it was delicious. No pics – it disappeared quickly. 

pat m.

…But I Could Totally Whoop Michael Pollan’s Ass

So the lady let me borrow her borrowed copy of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.

For those of you not in the know (read: you don’t hang around enough white people), Michael Pollan is a journalist who has released three books about, well, food. Stop by Wikipedia for a general summary of the books, as well as a fascinating tidbit: Did you know that Michael Pollan is Michael J. Fox’s brother-in-law? If only Marty McFly could have lent Pollan the DeLorean for a little bit.

In Defense of Food basically tells us that people who eat a standard western diet are only getting gradually unhealthier, and that our lifespan these days has less to do with how we’re eating and more with medical advances that make diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc. more survivable conditions. (Since the lady has been battling health problems of her own without health insurance, the bit about spending more on food to spend less on health care down the line sounded particularly appealing.) Specifically, Pollan argues, the reductionist approach to healthy eating – attempting to identify the individual nutrients that have positive effects on the human body – is giving us margarine instead of butter (margarine -> trans fats -> heart disease) and Vitamin Whatever-enriched Wonder Bread. Whatever we’re eating these days, Pollan says, most of it isn’t food food.

If my cousins are reading this (that’s you, Ted): all that garbage your mom fed you is going to kill you. Do something about it.

 If you want to just hear his eating guidelines, they’ve got ‘em up in the T-Nation book review: his advice, succinctly put, boils down to: “Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants.”

I am a competitive athlete. As a BJJ player, I need to make sure that my body is optimally tuned to fight: I need muscle, and I need energy, but I need to make sure I’m as lean as possible to make weight, too. Because of this, my nutritional needs are substantially different from Pollan’s: as a fellow writer, I can assure you that if my job consisted of sitting on my ass in a bougie cafe for a couple hours a day and then going out to eat at Chez Panisse (they’re in his acknowledgements section, by the way), I’d probably eat like he did, too.

But as it turns out, a lot of his stuff seems to be perfectly compatible with the sports nutritionists that we see pop up every now and then in the world of combat sports. Honestly, when it comes down to it, the only major difference between “Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants.” and the eating philosophy of this blog is the “Not much” part. The nutritionists – and the nutritionism - that Pollan is beefing with are the ones who work to isolate the ingredients needed to live and process food to contain those for cheaper than it would be to make a simple whole food (vitamin-enriched Wonder Bread vs. a loaf of unremarkable whole wheat bread, for instance). He’s calling out the FDA, the assholes who decided that Twinkies were a good idea, the people who sell us stuff that looks like food but ends up killing us.

And you know what? That’s something that plenty of weightlifters, bodybuilders, and fighters have been saying Fuck You to for years. I can’t think of any remotely credible nutritionist who has recommended eating processed garbage. Whenever anyone asks “how do I get big?” the answer is always “eat more real food.” Yes, the local GNC and the bodybuilding enthusiast magazines are full of supplement ads, and even John Berardi can’t seem to resist plugging Surge (It’s the perfect post-workout drink! Don’t you know he designed it himself?), but at its heart, it’s about eating lots of real food – many of which are plants.

In the absence of rock-solid nutritional information (I think he compares nutritionists to early 1800s surgeons in an interview somewhere – interesting work, but you don’t want to leave your life in their hands quite yet), Pollan suggests that it’s probably a better idea to eat the way people have ate for hundreds of years, before factory farms and high-fructose corn syrup. It makes a certain intuitive sense, of course – if we have to take everything we read about nutrition in the papers with a gigantic grain of salt (we’re probably supposed to watch our sodium intake, too), why not revert to a diet that looks more like our grandparents’ or great-grandparents, who seemed to live a lifestyle less conducive to heart disease, cancer, and all kinds of other horrible afflictions we now just kind of consider “part of getting old”?

What Pollan doesn’t seem to pay much attention to is that there are millions of people out there who are currently fine-tuning their diets by listening to what their bodies tell them – that’s you, readers. (Yes, I said millions.) Pollan doesn’t like supplements – he says that while people who take supplements generally tend to be healthier and more educated than those who don’t, it’s usually not because of the supplements – but I can tell you that my fat ass jug of whey protein powder helps my body recover after a heavy workout because I can wake up the next morning and not hurt quite so much. Just because we’re not nutritionists doesn’t mean that we’re left helpless to figure out what’s good for our bodies – we just have to get used to listening to them, and that takes more physical effort than sitting around writing a book.

(Pollan, if you’re reading this, give me an email and we’ll figure out your next book. You can talk about how awesome Jiu Jitsu is.)

pat m.

So Glad To Be Back

It’s good to be back home.

I like to write occasionally about eating healthily, cheaply, and deliciously, but since I’ve been in Japan for the last year, I don’t think that much of what I’ve been writing has been particularly relevant to most of you. Frankly, it hasn’t been that relevant to me either, insofar as being in Japan generally requires me to sacrifice one of the three; Japanese food is delicious and healthy but not cheap, and my own cooking can be cheap and healthy but it’s not usually particularly tasty, especially because most of the ingredients I know how to use are expensive overseas.

Pictured below is today’s Welcome Back lunch: Black beans, spinach, chorizo, and two eggs (not pictured) with mozzarella cheese, all over some basmati rice. I got a light morning workout in (4×2 minute rounds of alternating between burpees and shadowboxing every thirty seconds, then some crab walks, frog walks, etc.) so I’m not sweating the carbohydrates too much. 

To put the US – Japan price difference in perspective:

18 eggs here cost me the same as 10 eggs there, spinach was about 3x as expensive there, and you can forget about black beans and chorizo.

But! Living with the lady, who has been reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, has motivated me to start buying higher quality groceries. Well, next time, anyway.

In fact, a blog entry on Pollan for competitive athletes – which he is most definitely not – might be some interesting stuff for this blog.

Next, the gear porn, as promised:

The shirt is one of my favorites – an old Millenia Fight Team shirt from my former BJJ instructor Gabe Ruediger’s first WEC title match, I believe. I like the logo, though it’s a little crowded. The shorts are nothing special – picked ‘em up at Uniqlo for about $9. Cheap, comfy, but I wouldn’t train in them.

The centerpiece here, of course, is the Reversal Black Belt. Sadly, it’s not “real” – it just holds up pants – but man, it’s cool.

pat m.

Back from Japan!

…and ready to try and make another effort at this blog, now that I’m officially Unemployed.

Haven’t joined a gym yet – currently thinking about Open Door BJJ and Eduardo Rocha BJJ, both in Oakland. I should probably find an apartment first, though. And maybe something to pay the bills…eventually.

Got a light workout in this morning, shaking off some of the jet-lagged muzziness with pushup intervals (oddly enough, my folks purchased some Perfect Pushups. Not worth the hype, but I might borrow them since they’re “free”.), squat intervals, burpees, and then some light shadowboxing. Not bad, considering I’m somewhat limited by my lack of running shoes. I should get on that.

Finally, what better way to apologize for missing a few months of blogging by posting some gear pics? Here’s day one of Pat’s New Stuff-o-Mania:

Here we have the red and white Inspirit New Spec Model 1s (red and white, embroidered logo). They retail for $68, but I got them from Hatsu Hioki as a going-away present. Haven’t trained in them yet, but they’re roomy, less baggy than the Bull Terrier shorts I’ve got (which is good – they’re not really great for ground work) and plenty comfy.

The top is a Reversal-brand fight shirt for Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. Got it at the American Casual store in Nagoya for about $12, used, which suits me fine because it looks good “distressed”. Reversal designs tend to work with black and white, mostly, but I can’t stop coming back for more. And really, you can’t say no to a shirt that says “STOMP ‘EM ALL” in big letters. Love it!

pat m.