Interesting Evening

Carb depletion, you’ve gotta hate it. You think you don’t need pasta and then you go and do a session like last night’s. Some of the guys are on the cut right now and one or two are slightly above target. One guy in particular has been set a diet to get him waaaaaayyy down, and he suffered last night so I think for quality of training for him we’ll have to up the carbs a bit. I’d say this is common across all sports but December sucks for colds doesn’t it? Lots of snot floating around last night and one guy back after a week of coughing and spluttering. Let’s hope the guys all stay illness free for the next week and a half or so.

Last night we did some work on the Brabao choke from side control and from half guard, as well as a sneaky baseball bat variation that I’ve been digging on lately. First we rolled for 4 or 5 rounds to shake the weekand off. The Brabao is one of my favourite submissions because it catches people doing the right thing. A lot of submissions rely on mistakes but this one involves your partner getting to his side as he should, working his underhook in as he should and then bam, you hit him with the brabao. I likes it. MMA involved about 30 minutes of takedown finishes with your partner sprawling, the idea being to sharpen people’s finishes and run over some technique variations on the sprawl. We finished with sparring and then master blaster awesome super secret rounds of cardio. Deadly… to watch. Not so deadly to do.

I had a session this morning. It would be wrong to say it was hard. Will said that my strength sessions will actually be quite easy, by comparison to my conditioning work. It wasn’t hard in the traditional sense, but I found it really mentally straining. After some brief, technical 500s on the rower focussing on technique, I did a shoulder helath/scap circuit. Very annoying to do this. It’s like learning how to write again or something. It’s very hard to describe the feeling of watching your body do something on one side that you know is wrong and having almost no control over the result. The best example I can give you about my back imbalance is when your grip goes after a while of squeezing something. You try your best to squeeze but there’s just no power there and your hand ends up trying to recruit your arm for help and it moves involuntarily. Ever happen to you? Even if it hasn’t, I’m sure you can imagine the frustration. Still I actually feel a slight difference with the band work from when I started. My shoulder doesn’t seem to raise as much on them and I seem to have more control of the band. This may just be a neurological response to being more familiar with the exercise rather than the back becoming stronger, but even if it is just that, that’s good as it means I’m learning how to engage the back more on the pulls.

After that, 50 band assisted pull ups supersetted with blast strap push ups (sets of 5 each), ab roll outs supersetted with reverse hypers, 5 sets of 10, and then natural ham glute raises, 8 sets of 5. I think maybe my hamstrings will die tomorrow from those last ones. I’ll let you know.