BJJ Training Log 1.18.2017

Yesterday was the worst training session I’ve ever had. I’ve had a couple that weren’t great because I was on the verge of illness or tired from a really hard couple of days leading up to it, but this was just a bad day. It didn’t help that I was having trouble getting stretched out from last week (5 training sessions). I’d been having trouble getting around on Saturday and Sunday. My lower back felt like I’d played rugby for a complete week before. My attempts to stretch it out were pretty weak; I had trouble even getting to a position that would allow me to stretch.

I went on a really slow and easy run on Tuesday to try and get my blood moving and get loosened up a little, but the foam roller probably did more to help than anything. At least I was walking pretty normal by Wednesday morning.

The problem with the Wednesday class is that we don’t do any kind of structured warm up. It’s get there whenever you want and stretch on your own, then straight to technique. I can’t really get there too early because of work, and with the limited time I had I just couldn’t get loose. By the time technique started I wasn’t even mentally there yet. My back was so stiff I was having trouble getting my legs into the positions to even work the technique, which sucks, because we learned some good stuff.

Finishing a defended Kimura

  • Shrimp knee out and foot on hip
  • Shin under arm where kimura is being defended
  • Slide hand in and roll hips back.
  • Another option is to get a cuff grip to break the hold on the leg, then swim under with the other arm
  • Take the back or do the thumb in choke

It’s almost as if I didn’t learn the technique at all. Just felt like crap. Only rolled one round, which was a disaster for me, and drove home with a towel on my head. I started thinking about this in the perspective of a tough running week or a week of rugby after a tournament.

Sometimes you just need an easier lighter week to recover from a couple of hard weeks, and that’s probably where I am for this week.

I’m glad I’ve kept a blog for so long. I was able to go back and read some thoughts about times when I’ve bonked runs (and finished them) or just had an inexplicably bad day and then PR’d a distance I wasn’t even training for on the next day. I know it’s not apples to apples, and I know I’m so knew to BJJ that I’m probably too ignorant to understand whether or not it applies at all, but at least there was some piece of mind to be gained in knowing that I’ve gone through something similar before.

Some days just suck. You can definitely do stuff to make things suck more. But sometimes it just sucks and you don’t know why. This is the first day like that I’ve had in BJJ.

It puts my mind at ease a little to know that this happens sometimes in other sports too with no real explanation.

So I got the crap beat out of me. Nothing new there actually, just a different person doing it. Ed tapped me out twice in 5 minutes. Silver lining is that I defended the arm bar by lazily using the least amount of energy possible. “What’s the easiest way out of this?” I had to evaluate the situation and find the easy escape.

For the rest of the roll, I just survived as long as I could.

At lunch today I went to the gym to get some time in the whirlpool and stretching in the sauna to get my back as loose as I can.