So, I was able to take three weeks off of work for the Christmas season here, and had planned on doing an intensive Martial Arts training schedule, but the plans got waylaid when my wife ended up with COVID.

Anyhow, after quarantining those first two weeks, my third and final week starts today. So Imma train as much as I can this week and see how it goes. I’m not actually going to a camp exactly, just training twice daily Mondays and Wednesdays and once daily Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Usually I do strength training in the morning before work every day, but as I will be taking sometimes two BJJ classes a day this week I decided I’d skip my regular morning routine this week so I don’t over-train. I have been taking my family to Judo, and the classes run in the evening on days of my BJJ classes. On the couple of weeks that I’ve done both (4 days in a row of evening training) I’ve really started to feel strained by the end of the week, but I’d like to get my body used to it if possible.

Today for the first time I was able to take advantage of the morning class today, never quite sure what to expect with a new class/ new instructor, but I was coming in fresh as I’d skipped my usual morning workout. I’m not sure whether it will be the same every morning class, but it was just an hour of live-rolling (Jiu Jitsu sparring).

One of these days I’d like to be able to work from home (with some combination of writing, voice acting (here’s me in a Spiderman comic fandub), ministry, and general creativity)… if ever I get the opportunity to work from home I’ll probably try to work the morning class into my schedule.

There weren’t a huge amount of people so I got to roll with everyone, most of them two or three times. I had one good takeaway from a pretty advanced level guy I rolled with today. He had this mount technique – I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but Imma call it ‘the frog’ because it basically felt like a huge frog was on top of me. Essentially he’d get into a full mount position (for those unfamiliar full mount is when the guy on bottom is on his back and the guy on top is basically straddling his/her waist; the person on top has the dominant position and the person on bottom basically has only his/her arms to grapple with), and instead of grapevining my legs (that is: wrapping his legs around mine so as to more fully immobilize the legs), he would climb up my torso and wrap the arches of his feet around my hips. You might think I could shrimp out of it (that is: twist and thrust my hips away from him) but with his feet so high on my body he could really effectively control my posture with his arms and upper body. Oh, and if I framed too much with my arms he could easily turn it into an arm submission (armbar, americana, etc.). Yeah that was… a blast, but a method I can’t wait to use, myself.

Anyhow day 1, class 1 was good; I don’t regret skipping my usual morning workout, I definitely got good full body muscle work in. I thought I’d come home and work my abs before jumping into the shower (Wife got me some ankle weights for Christmas which has really stepped up the intensity of my abs work), but actually when I started, I realized rolling had already worked even my abs a lot better than I had realized.

Looking forward to class this evening!