Subs from Side AND No gi!

8/20 - Morning - Valley

Back at the Valley after a week or so off. Today was a diet of side-control submissions and transitions to mount. Knee-bar, kimura, kimura to arm-bar, neck crank and toe hold. We went over a bicep slicer as part of the kimura-to-armbar transition....which I'm pretty sure isn't legal at most tournaments, at least at blue.

Had a good roll with Holly going when her kneecap become firmly planted in my right quad. Initially I kept going (we were in the midst of a scramble) but after a couple of seconds I tapped and took a moment to collect my thoughts. I feel a bit bad about stopping the roll for that, b/c it wasn't an injury per se, but the depth to which her knee seemed to penetrate my muscles/tendons/etc did take me by surprise. I sat out for a couple of minutes, then rolled with Gary, then back with Holly. I kept trying to do a basic spiderguard sweep with both Gary and Holly and was wildly unsuccessful. I was able to maintain spiderguard at will with Holly. I felt like I was able to scramble well with Gary.

On a side note, my legs are killing me since I did squats yesterday. I took ~10 days off from lifting and apparently that was enough to ensure that I had to go through the whole squat DOMS cycle again. Grrrr...

The Brazilian Portuguese learning is sputtering a bit. I've been going back and forth between an online resource (Duolingo) and textbook material. The Duolingo part is starting to get tricky b/c there is no explanation, only exercises. For example, it would be helpful to see a chart of a verb conjugated before the exercise so that I have some idea of what the verb is in all of it's forms. Or, if they stuck with one verb throughout it's various conjugations instead of skipping around. It's still a great tool though! Need to spend more time with the book too.

Evening - Downtown

On a whim I decided to go to a no gi class. It's my second no gi class in a year, so my expectations were reasonably pretty low. Was hoping to get knowledge bombs, and instead got an hour and a half of straight rolling to help me figure out my weak points. Ok, well point taken. I can't sweep in no gi. If I couldn't hip bump them or arm-drag, I had absolutely no idea what to do. Nothing was as glaring as a weakness as the sweeps. We started with a shark tank for competitors (mount or back-mount was the only way to "win"), so there was very little rest for the first hour. After that it was rounds (5min I think) of the usual rolling drill. I probably sweat out at least 3lb if not 5lb. The mats were a slip and slide. Yeeeeeeeeeeeech. I'm going to go pass out now.