The journey of an MMA noob, week four

January 1, 2012 MMA, The journey of an MMA noob, 0

This week we had BJJ on Monday and Wednesday as always, then we had wrestling on Tuesday and no-gi BJJ on Thursday.

Tuesday

Wrestling on a Tuesday, brutal!
I paired up with a really nice guy called George who has been training for a while, I always like training with the more experienced guys. He’s a very helpful partner and it makes all the difference to be training with someone like that, not that I have met anyone there who isn’t like that so far anyway.

We do some wrestling warmups in lines on the mats, just dropping down for a double-leg takedown while the partner backs up. After just that I was exhausted, like I said before wrestling is hard and intense. I love it because I know if I keep doing it my fitness is just gonna skyrocket.

Next we get into drills and today we learn how to get takedowns from just having one of the other guy’s arms, then counters and then counters to counters, and one of the members who is a black belt in Judo even showed us how to modify one of them to use a Judo hip-toss which was fun and useful.
I find wrestling really hard, partly because it’s very different to anything I’ve done before and partly because of my considerable lack of fitness, so I was really happy to hear the instructor give me what I think is a massive compliment, saying it looked like I’ve done one of the moves for years. I was absolutely beaming from that especially because I thought I was probably doing badly.

After drills we put our new knowledge to the test on our partners.
I gas out pretty quickly, there is a huge difference between drilling a move and actually going for it.
You can do 10 reps in a row in practice without breaking a sweat but then just doing it one time for real is exhausting! I do alright, he gets me down a few times and vice versa.

Then we do the same but against the whole class. This time I don’t get anyone down but I do notice the other people’s techniques when they got me down so I hope to learn from them. One of the guys got a very low double-leg and I just fell right over, I can’t wait until I’m able to do that.

The big thankyou gift!

Next we get a surprise, we’ve got a big thankyou gift to Koji, the Judo black belt who also organised our end of year get-together last weekend.
The wonderful gift is that we all get into a circle around him and each attack him for 1 minute. I’m amazed at how well he did, my hat’s off to him because he kept going through everyone, some people more than once, with only one 1-minute break in the middle.
When it was my turn to get him I started out well, which wasn’t hard because he was already on his back (yeah it was ultra unfair but that’s the point of the circle), I got knee on belly then a slight half-guard, he wasn’t doing much and I thought I’d better do something so I stepped over into mount and immediately realised he had been baiting me with the mount so he could use my motion to sweep me, which he did thanks to my poor technique.
He gets up and punches me in the face a couple of times which hurt, I close the distance to go for a takedown but after only 2 wrestling classes I’m still ultra bad at takedowns, so he easily turns it to his advantage and then our time’s up.

Wednesday

This was the last BJJ session for the year and it’s the hardest I’ve been to so far. My cardio was just shot throughout it, but I also learned some really valuable techniques, including a sweep that I was able to put to use successfully later on.
To start with we did a lot more warmups than usual, then we drilled sweeps, armbars from the top and bottom, hip-outs and more. The pace was pretty full-on and I was partnered up with a cardio machine so I was definitely getting a good workout!
Then we put what we drilled to the test against random opponents, starting in guard the person on top had to pass and the person on bottom had to sweep. It was fun and I had a bit (not much, but a bit, which is more than usual) of success with this which made me happy since it means I’m progressing.

During this sparring I landed funny on my elbow which made my shoulder jolt upwards and it got damaged so I had to stop. It was pretty painful and couldn’t move my arm for a little while, I just stood on the side until the pain went away. The guy who I was against came over after a bit and I told him what had happened, he said the same thing has happened to him a couple of times.
He said it’s when the AC joint jolts and damages itself or something and that he had taken 2-3 weeks off to let it heal.

After training we hang out and have pizza, generously provided by our resident Santa. Cool to chat with some of the other members before heading off.
Since I’m writing this about 2 weeks after that happened I can say my shoulder feels better than it did, it still hurts in some positions but I’m sure it will be all good by next week when training starts again.

The journey of an MMA noob, week two

December 20, 2011 MMA, The journey of an MMA noob, 0

This week was my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu lesson (in the last 2 years) and my first wrestling lesson, as well as another muay thai (striking) class.

Day one aftermath

In the previous post I mentioned my finger got kicked, well it swelled up a lot and I could hardly move it.
I waited a day for it to get better but it didn’t so I thought I’d better get it checked.
The doctor said it seems broken so sent me off to the hospital for x-rays.
I’m thinking Ugh this is such bad luck after only one day.
I get the x-rays done and it’s all fine, it will just take a little while for the tissue to heal itself but there’s no bone damage. Phew!

When your middle finger is screwed up you realise how much you use it in everyday life. It provides a lot of support to the index finger.
Luckily I had injured it on a Thursday, so I had the whole weekend to recover.

I also took Monday off as it was still messed up, which is a shame because I really wanted to go, but didn’t want to keep re-injuring it.
The image above is what it looked like after most of the swelling went down.

Tuesday

OK so I’m back to training on Tuesday and we do some more striking. Like before I’m out of breath the whole time. I can’t remember much from that day so let’s skip to Wednesday.

Wednesday

Here’s my first BJJ class. It’s taught by Geoff Grant, pictured on the right with Royce Gracie. Geoff is a really nice guy (like Gareth is, too) and cracks me up, he’s always cracking jokes and giving the class a fun atmosphere even though at the same time we are all trying to work and learn.
That weekend they’d had a seminar with Robert Drysdale and he had taught the guys to spend more time on their feet while looking for position instead of being on their knees, so we drilled that.
That left me pretty tired from holding the squat position for long periods of time, so again I’m just looking forward to being more fit.

There was a lot of shin-on-thigh action which left me with 2 bruised and sore thighs since my partner was fairly heavy, ouch!
We learned some great stuff and I really love BJJ.
I could only stay for an hour because I’m not ready for the advanced class yet, which happens in the second hour.

Thursday

This is the last class of the week for me and I’m very pleased to see it’s wrestling!
Wrestling is the part of MMA that is most foreign to me so it’s what I was most looking forward to learning.
Like before, the first hour is instruction while the second is practice.
For the first hour we drill takedowns and takedown defense against the cage. I do OK against some people – the ones who are being nice to the noob – and fail miserably against others.

When we finish the drills we have mini competitions where you practice with a guy to get the takedown and whoever hits the floor first loses while the winner keeps their position on the mat. We do the same against the cage, where the attacker has to get the other guy down while the defender has to turn the other guy around so his back is against the cage.
In both exercises I didn’t have much success, I only won a couple of times (versus about a million losses) but I could feel myself slowly becoming more aware each time which is a cool feeling.

This is the most intense workout so far. Wrestling uses so much of your body at once!

Afterwards

I felt incredible a few minutes after that huge workout again, and my clothes were absolutely drenched in sweat.
The real fun came the next day, though, when I get out of bed and couldn’t sit up without relying fully on my arms. For that whole weekend I must have been pretty funny to watch as I spent several seconds just getting up and down from sitting. It was a good pain though, I knew it was because I had re-awoken muscles that hadn’t been used in a long time so I was still really happy about it.

The journey of an MMA noob, day one

December 18, 2011 MMA, The journey of an MMA noob, 0

This post is the first in a series I’ll be writing called The Journey of an MMA noob.
I thought it could be fun to write about some of the experiences I’ve had while training MMA while these memories are so fresh in my mind.
I’m writing this as a stream-of-consciousness; I want the reader to have an idea of my thoughts and feelings instead of just the events.
It’s my hope that people who have an interest in training can read this and get an idea of what to expect, and of course it will be nostalgic for people who have trained and currently train since these experiences are common to most people.

First Steps

I show up to my first class a little nervous, not knowing what to expect.
I walk into the gym and see it’s full of mats with a row of benches along one side.
I see Gareth Lewis, the head trainer. He asks me if I’ve done anything before and I think to myself be honest but not cocky.

In reality he probably wouldn’t have cared what I said either way.

I just say something like “I’ve been doing a bit of boxing this year but I’m not very good.”.
For this journey – and in my life in general – I’m trying to have as little ego as possible, which isn’t always easy for me. I also want confidence, so it’s a fine line between the two, but I think it can work if I keep working on it.

Warmup

So we start on warmups. At this gym we only do a small warmup, lasting only a few minutes, which is great because my cardio is far from good enough, and the nerves reduce it even further.
We do long hops from one end to the other and do some forwards, sideways and backwards running.
Despite the shortness of the warmup I’m still breathing hard after it and trying not to show it, but probably failing miserably.
We’re told to put on shin and instep guards for practicing kicks and conditioning, and we partner up. I didn’t have shin-guards but was lucky enough to borrow one from someone which was very nice of them since it left him with only one instead of two.

Instruction

At this gym, the first hour is for instruction and drills while the second hour is for sparring.
I partner up with a really nice guy called Paul, we chatted while gently kicking eachother’s ribs and he didn’t seem to mind that I was out of breath the entire time and had to pause here and there.
Paul threw a slow kick, not much behind it and I stupidly rotated my arm and it caught my left middle finger and I knew something happened. It’s an old habit from a previous martial art, a habit I’m now determined to break. After the initial pain, I put it in the back of my mind and kept going. I thought it would be pretty embarrassing and not a good first impression to make a big deal out of a sore finger that was moving fine.
We did some punching drills and then the first hour was up, at which point Paul left because of the train timetable.

Sparring

Onto the second hour of the night.
I go up against a guy, put on a poor performance and go to the bathroom to throw up – which is something that often happens if I’ve pushed my cardio very hard – but it doesn’t happen and after a few minutes of getting my breath back I go out again and start sparring.

I go up against a few people and learn some names which I of course forgot almost instantly as it’s all just a blur of faces on your first day.
Everyone was pretty nice, I wasn’t having any success but everyone remembers being a noob at some stage so they weren’t dicks about it.
Towards the end of the second hour I go up against an old schoolmate of mine, Chris Pointer, and chat a little bit while we spar. Turns out he’s been going for years. He gets a solid punch to my face, we keep going and move on to other partners.

Afterwards

Training ends and I leave very sore, winded and drenched in sweat but I feel alive for the first time in a long time.
I really pushed myself over and over again within those two hours and only a few minutes after leaving I noticed my eyes were wider, breathing deeper, back straighter, mind clearer, mood lighter and all the benefits of pushing your body physically.

I had gone in without knowing what to expect, wondering if I was going to like it or feel like an outsider, but straight away I felt welcomed and included. I didn’t particularly notice any huge egos looking to rip down others, I saw people willing to be good partners for mutual benefit.

I was already looking forward to the next session!