Thursday, March 29, 2007

A change of style

I have taken a decision to change my style of grappling. For many years, I have played a really lazy game that was mostly build on waiting, relaxing and waiting for my opponent to make mistakes that I could take advantage of. Great style for me, because it is highly technical and doesn't demand too much of endurance or strength to be effective. However, now when many of my training partners get really good and start to match me technically plus get to know my game, they rarely make mistakes for me to exploit anymore. So if I have a day where I relax a little too much, I can get completely run over by some of these guys. And that is a beautiful thing, because it has led me to the decision, that I will try to change my style for a while.

Instead of the lazy game, I will try to be more aggresive in attacking and setting up my opponent to my advantage. I don't want to lay still and wait, but instead I will try to attack again and again, constantly putting pressure on my training partners.

I have been playing this game for about a week and a half now and it is doing a big difference. Ofcourse, I do it mostly with people who challenge me technically or athletically - beginners I still go nice and slow with, no idea in just smashing them :D

One thing I have realized though, is how much tougher this game is for my body. I am SO sore after training now. Probably also because I have had a month off training, but training with this intensity really burns me out. I need more sleep and more+better food to play this game. It is hard, but also a lot of fun. For instance, this attacking game has led me to experiment with the flying triangle guard pass. Really takes some commitment to do it, but it is awesome when it works. Caught it five times in sparring last week, VERY NIAAAICE!!

Project 1000 flighthours down by two hours this week :)

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

One month break + 5 hours training = FUCK!

Ok, so I ended up training for five hours yesterday and when I woke up this morning I felt like I would never be able to get out of the bed. Every muscle in my body hurts, I feel sooo busted right now. Had to skip all weightlifting today, but I'll get back to that later in the week :)

Here are two very inspiring clips I found, awesome flow... enjoy:



Monday, March 19, 2007

Rolling again!!

YES! Finally I can roll again! I started out doing just a little guard work and standup some days ago, and today I turned up the intensity and rolled almost 100%. For some strange reason, after training today, my knee felt completely drained for liquid. Like it just disappeared during training. AWESOME!!!

During the last few weeks, I have just been lifting a lot of weights, which has been really boring. Last saturday, we had two guys from the gym fighting amateur MMA for the first time. It went great, one win and one loss. Here is one of the fights with Nicolas from the gym:



Most people think of our gym as a grappling school, so it is pretty cool to show up at MMA tournaments and hit people in the face instead... just as a surprise :D

I am so excited over the rolling today, it was such a relief to be able to work on the mat again. I was wearing a big smile for the entire evening of training.

I have now added the first mileage to my 1000 flighthours project. Total of five hours of sparring over the last few days. 995 hours to go!! :)

Monday, March 5, 2007

Project 1000 flighthours

I am getting really desperate to train now, I can do absolutely nothing with this stupid knee :( All I do is hang out in the gym and lift weights, which bores me like hell.

So I have been thinking about a little project for myself I want to launch, when my knee is good again... "Project 1000 flighthours". I want to roll for 1000 hours and see what happens. I have no idea how long it is gonna take, but I am willing to give it a try. A year? Two years? Ten years? I am in the gym every day anyway, so I can always ask my friends if they wanna come by and roll a little. I think it is gonna be an exciting project and a lot of hard work.

I will use this blog to keep track of the hours and then evaluate when I one day finish it. I am eager to see how far I can go in 1000 hours of rolling.

__