At long last
Had my first week back at training last week and it was amazing! I had really missed it.
Monday
We practiced sweeps to warm up then near and far-side head-arm chokes plus a variation where you bend their arm if they’re defending the choke.
So if you have the position for a head-arm choke from side-control but the guy defends by putting his hand behind his head to prevent you getting close enough to finish the choke, you can try to put your head on the mat and against his head, then grab that defending forearm and drag it around your head.
It hurts and they should tap before you rip it.
Tuesday
We did wrestling and as always it gassed me out and killed my legs pretty quickly! We were mostly doing double-legs this time (which is when you grab both of their legs to take them down), so it started out after the warmup with pairing up into groups of 4 and each taking turns taking the other 3 down.
Then we split off into pairs and took eachother down but this time it was a competition to see how many we could get in a minute. We seemed to average about 12 per minute, while the winners got about 25 once I think. So we did that 4 times in a row which was difficult but fun!
We also did it slowly in order to practice technique.
I’ve started doing squats and other things to increase my wrestling stamina so I hope that works because on my way home I was basically waddling back since my legs were so spent!
Wednesday
This jiu jitsu session was awesome because my friend Brad came along.
He’s been wanting to do jiu jitsu for a while but the place he tried where he lives (FightShop in Palmerston North) was disappointing. So on his day off he came up here to hang out and try out GSW, the BJJ club I go to.
We did an interesting exercise in this session which is to do one single move at a time, so you do one then your partner does one. It’s really cool and you end up in some weird positions (a bit like Twister sometimes) but it works your brain a lot. It makes you realise which move is the most urgent in a series of moves – which one you should be doing first in order to allow the rest to follow.
Brad really enjoyed it and he got to meet some of the people at the club – who are all awesome. I felt a bit sorry for him doing that on his first night since he didn’t know what he was supposed to be aiming for, but afterwards in the second hour I taught him some basic things (being very careful to keep it broad since I’m not good yet either) and he learned pretty quickly.
He’s considering moving closer sometime soon in which case he would start training BJJ too which would be EPIC! We seem to be fairly evenly matched in terms of strength so he would make a great training partner.
On Thursday I had a bunch of little injuries from the last 3 days so I thought it best to skip it and recover instead. My shoulder was jacked up so bad I had to get my girlfriend to help me put my shirt on in the morning haha. It’s Sunday now and it’s sore but I can move it around so I’ll be good to go again on Monday.
It’s great to be back to training!
