01.02.09

Yesterday's training was a good one! Saturdays are always brutal with 1.5 hours at Canton Gym followed by another 2 hour session at Sparta Gym. Its nice to get so much mat time in one day and really helps me to work on anything I need to improve. We went over guard passes and side control escapes in the first session with some sparring from stand up. In the second session it was a submission combination from guard involving breaking posture and moving to the side of your opponent, almost as if you were taking their back. From here we drilled a kimora, collar choke, sweep and armbar combination, and finally taking the back from the same position. It was a small class with sparring consisting of rolling with a newbie, my girlfriend (more on her later) and my instructor Tolly. Was fun and I got to practice my triangles from guard and a few reverse ones! One move that I picked up over Christmas which I am finding very effective is to pull guard and then go for an armbar. Once the opponent begins stacking you, let them pull out their 'armbared' arm and switch your grip to their other arm which should be inbetween your legs. Move your knee that is closest to their head to the other side of the neck and close the triangle. Move hips to opposite side to finish! I seem to be pulling off a good amount of triangles with this move as people stack you which brings their head nice and low making it very easy to slide your leg over their face and lock in the triangle with suprising speed.

I have a Human Resources exam tomorrow so today I need to get my act together and get a bunch of revision done! It is way too easy to distract myself with training - before I know it I am going through different game plan options of formulating a plan of attack for a particular opponent in one of the BJJ classes! Must Work!!! I will probably break up my revision with a gym session just to get some sort of training done. I am still in two minds over whether to train for strength or mix it all up. One day I will feel like doing some traditional powerlifting routines and others I want to train everything in one workout. Right now I am playing it however I feel it and doing what I want. After the Bristol Open I will try to get my weight back up to around 80kg so I can compete at 82kg. Right now I am at 77kg down from around 85kg and feeling a bit skinny! Never mind, after the competition I can work on getting some size back but right now I need to focus on coming up with an effective strategy.

One last rant! I cant get my beautiful koral gi clean! For the first 6 months of my BJJ training I used a huge, baggy judo gi which made it horribly easy for opponents to use it against me. Now that I have an actual BJJ gi, I appreciate it so much. But one of the gyms I roll at has these mats which tend to make your gi go a grey/black colour on the back, knees and elbow areas. I currently wash my gi on the 'hand wash' setting at 25 degrees but it still comes up with 'patches' of colour on it. These gi is new! Like brand new! Someone help! I might just leave it in a lukewarm bath tub for 3 hours and see if that works. I should have just got a blue gi like Rach did so that the dirt doesn't show up. Anyone else have this' dirt patch' problem?