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I had a good sleep, did the morning routine, went to the
coffeeshop at 7:00am, refreshed my Latex skills for a talk,
smog-tested the car, and came home at 10:30am. I went for the
kettlebells. Since pumping up the dosage on BJJ, I haven't
practiced S&S very often (about twice a week). Today, I did
a session with 40kg swings and 32kg getups and left at
11:00am for the gym.
Nine guys showed up: our coach J, brown belt X (I don't know
his name, so X), purplebelts J and R, bluebelts O and R, and
whitebelts J, X, and me.
Coach led the warmup and it was good but not too hard. One
drill I was very proud of was twisting on the back and using
shoulders and hips to get across the mat. It was a
show-stopper for me a few months ago. Today I led the pack.
The techniques today were
1. arm-attack with knee-pinning the shoulder, and
2. butterfly hook to sweep when he defends the attack.
I trained with O and purplebelt R on this, corrected a few
details, e.g., trapping the arm early, the position of the
knee, flatening the guy, etc., and eventually was able to do
the moves well.
Then came 10-min-long sparring sessions. We split into pairs
and I rolled with O, R, and J. I was able to wrap O's right
arm and sink a collar choke to him using what I learnt on
Thursday. It was unsuccessful as he defended using his left
hand pushing my right elbow.
The toughest session came with J, a tall, strong white dude
and at least 30lbs bigger. We started by me in his guard. I
tried to get out and he tried to break my posture and draw
me close. Whenever I tried to do the Samurai guard-pass, he
swerved underneath and grabbed my ankle and I instinctively
retracted my leg (I didn't know what he was trying to do). I
showed great strength by sticking out my arms between our
upper bodies and eventually was able to pass, put my weight
on him, and switched from side- to full-mount.
We switched positions and, being big and strong, he passed
my guard right away and soon was able to mount me. I tried
first to elbow-escape but couldn't get his lower legs. His
base was perfectly aligned with lower legs tucked in. I had
no chance. Later, I was able to do an umpa on him (he didn't
get to high-mount) and ended in his guard.
Being whitebelts, we used full force all the way. But from
this session, I could see clearly skills mattered. J came to
the gym a few months after me. Although he sparred more (I assume since I just started sparring), he
seemed even more clueless. When I was in his guard, he knew
no other moves but grabbing my lapel and trying to hold me
down. When he mounted me, he didn't attempt high mount and
that gave me the chance to do the umpa.
It's like language, we only know words like "the," "blue,"
etc. It'll take both learning new words and practicing them
before we can speak some sentence with no errors.
J was utterly exhausted at the end. I felt spent and really
thankful for my years of strength training. Ain't Pavel
right in saying "Strength is the mother quality of everything?"
Coach seemed impressed and said to me twice:
"You did very good."
Sunday morning, my heart-rate went from Saturday's 55 to 60.
It's a recovery day, I thought. But the heart-rate went down
around noon to 50. So did I recover? It certainly felt so. Did
that mean the morning reading was not a reliable indicator?
Or I totally recovered within those three hours?
Seriously, the diet is more important than the walk!
Get rid of white flour/rice (including products made of them) in your diet and fast-walk one sweaty hour a day.
Give it try.