A congrats post

On Saturday night the Informed Performance crew made the short trip to nort countay Dub-a-lin to Rush, home of my relatives, Oglesby’s The Drop Inn pub (my uncle), a nice beach and Rumble in Rush fight night. We had a nice big crew of 30 people along to watch. We had a good result; Shayn won by decision in a fight that gassed both men, but apart from a brief arm bar attempt by his opponent and a couple of overhand lefts that caught Shayn, he never looked in trouble and I thought he wrestled extremely well and was well worth his win.

So I thought I’d write up what Shayn did to prepare for this fight, as it’s probably marginally more interesting than listening to me go on about my many injury problems. In September when the match was made, we had our training plan meeting. Me, Shayn and Will sat down and had a look through the weeks ahead, Shayn’s work schedule and the training sessions we most wanted him to hit each week. Shayn was cutting weight so we wanted him to get his conditioning in but also maintain his existing strength while training. What we came up with was as follows:

Monday- 7pm Muay Thai Technical, 8pm BJJ sparring

Tuesday- Strength, MMA technical

Wednesday- Conditioning, Muay Thai Sparring

Thursday- Strength or rest

Friday- conditioning

Saturday- Conditioning, MMA sparring

That was his training template, and with only a few exceptions, he stuck to it. The exceptions were when he had a work commitment or we felt that he should be doing something else for a session. For example we did no MMA on 2 Saturdays and did some wrestling technique and sparring instead when he was having some difficulty with that. Due to his job not finishing until late some nights, he did shorter conditioning sessions than most guys but with higher loading. Technical nights were kept technical and the emphasis was on quality and technique. For clinch, we did a lot of work on cornering the opponent and working against the corner pads for cheap takedowns. We knew the guy would probably have better Jiu Jitsu, so we came up with a safety game for the fight on the ground, and for stand up Shayn’s challenge was to improve his boxing during the training period.

Overall, it looks quite complex and taxing, and in many respects it was. But you’d be surprised how little we did some nights. He had 3 big sessions per week, which we identified as Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, but the others we could take or leave on any given week as long as he was accruing enough sessions over the week. To his credit he rarely missed a single session.

So that’s what it takes to fight at Informed Performance. Here’s the fight. Technically I’d say both guys are better than this, but tiredness took it’s toll and I think it was a very good outing for Shayn. As an aside I should point out that I found this on youtube and it’s obviously from Kyoujin, just in case you think I took it and was shouting for Joe.