This must be the world's least updated Blog

I’d like to apologise for that here and now. Things have been pretty mental at chez Barry, so mental in fact that there no longer is a chez Barry. I sold my house last week and I’m waiting to move into the new one so I’m actually posting this from my parent’s home. Eh, yipee.

Since my fight I’ve been sufferring from a couple of injuries, firstly my knee which went *pop* that night has been feeling a bit weak but seems to be 100% now. I box squatted pretty heavy last week with no ill effects. My shoulder and neck are , as usual, pretty messed up, but I decided to bite the bullet and train last night as I’ve had enough of the boredom of sitting on the side of the mats. Here’s what we did.

Muay Thai- 2 rounds skipping, 6 rounds on the bags, 3 rounds on the pads. Just tried to put a bit of volume in this session with no technique training for the guys at all. Sometimes you just need to hit stuff.
BJJ- The nogi session on a Monday is a good, hard 90 minute rolling session. Sometimes we do some specific technique but last night we did some up and down rounds with a constant 1 minute rest. The session is 90 minutes long and for 70 minutes of that last night we rolled in the following sequence:
3 mins
4 mins
5 mins
4 mins
3 mins
4 mins
5 mins
and so on for the hour and ten. The rest was a constant 1 minute. This was tough enough I think. Maybe I thought it was tougher because I haven’t trained in 4 weeks though. The idea was to go all out for the short rounds and to pace yourself better for the longer round. Bjj on a Thursday night has been about doing the same thing, we’ve done rounds from 3 minutes right up to 15 minutes to encourage two types of rolling. Longer rounds require more thought and patience, shorter rounds require a faster game or you may spend 3 minutes just trying to pass guard.

Part of this time experiment is for a bit of a laugh. I did every round one night with completely random numbers. “okay folks the next round is 5:34 long” and so on. But I’m also trying to encourage different behaviour in the athletes. You can’t have everything your own way all the time so if you’re a fast and explosive guy, sometimes you’ll be up against someone who will slow you down and you need to be able to pace yourself to match that game and not exhaust yourself. If you’re slow and patient, sometimes you’ll need that quick finish so it’s important to be able to push the pace too.

The other part I’m telling everyone is that I’m on the hunt for the perfect BJJ round. The search goes on.