After class I stayed for some randori and Professor Larry tied me in knots.  I notice that when I spar with black belts everything I do is the wrong thing and I have no idea I’m in trouble until I’m starting to black out…

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Sometimes if I can break away I go to the Ricardo Almeida academy in Hamilton NJ.  I’ll have to remember to bring my camera and take some pictures.  These guys train hard.  The first twenty minutes of class is taken up with running, cals, and throws.  All of their judo-style throws are smoother than mine, even the whitebelts.  So far, we’ve done hip throws, shoulder throws, and collar throws.  Then the rest of the class is skill training.  If you want to hang around afterwards, there is half an hour of randori.  I haven’t done that yet, because I’m on sort of a tight schedule, but maybe I can make it later this week.

I’m interested in the cultural differences across BJJ academies.  The Ricardo Almeida academy is closer to what I think of as a traditional Asian martial arts environment.  Students bow onto the mat and bow to each other before each go.  The instructors are addressed as “Professor”.  Most conspicuously, nobody is late to class.  Everybody is lined up at mat side ten minutes before the class begins.  As a first-generation Korean American I’m very comfortable with these social protocols and I find I slip into this environment easily.

At Hollywood BJJ we don’t bow onto the mat.  Instead of bowing to each other, students will exchange a fist-bump before each go.  Our instructors command the utmost respect, but we address them by their given names.  Overall the academy’s culture is one of informal camaraderie.  It certainly doesn’t raise any eyebrows when people straggle into class late, which is a frequent occurrence.  Lots of times we have music on when we roll, which I love.  BJJ and AC/DC is an unbeatable combination.

Since I haven’t been able to train much, I’m basically in maintenance mode.   A few posts ago I wrote about wanting to improve my guard game.  I think I’ve made some limited progress in that area.  I’ve been working on my arm bar from guard almost exclusively and I’m a little better with that.  My triangle is still pretty lame so I’m trying to work on that whenever I can.

As my teammates at HBJJ progress I find that the techniques I used to rely on no longer work.  For instance, I used to think I had a decent triangle escape, but I’ve realized that I’m only good at escaping white belt triangles.  A lot of the guys who became blue belts around the same time as me are submitting me with triangles now.  Their submissions evolved and my counters didn’t.  I have to raise my game for sure.

I was talking with a buddy of mine about jiu-jitsu one day and we were laughing about the frustrations involved with the art:  So when do you start to get good at this?

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Recently my buddy and fellow software engineer Brian Doll, unveiled a very cool online tool for tracking crossfit stats called statulo.us.  With statulo.us I now have a convenient tool for recording all my workouts.  Here’s what it looks like:

In crossfit you’re supposed to track your workouts so you can see how your performance trends over time.  In most crossfit workouts, the amount of time it takes you to finish a workout is inversely correlated with your power output, or intensity. In this example, I’ve graphed three different instances of the famous Annie workout.  In general you would want to see a downward trending line, which indicates increasing intensity.

In sum, statulo.us kicks ass and I can’t wait to see what other goodies Brian cooks up in his lab!

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