I went to Nationals to support my teammates from HBJJ.  I shot a bunch of video and took a bunch of pics.  I shot video during their matches and photos in between, so I don’t have a lot of action shots.  Here are some of the stills.

Here’s Sam in the bullpen.  I was waiting to video his match but somehow it happened and I didn’t even know about it until it was over.

Adam getting ready to rock.  Adam just moved from Crosley Gracie’s academy in Norcal.  Adam won a silver and fought five hard matches.

Here’s no-gi world champion Alex.  Alex didn’t compete today but instead was on hand to coach a lot of the HBJJ fighters.

Here’s Rachel putting a collar tie on some guy who happened to be walking by.  No, seriously, that’s John a purple belt teammate.

Dane won a few matches and then was eliminated in a very tough match by a cross town rival.

Just a couple of bad asses.  Andrew, the dude on the left, is competing tomorrow.

This workout is done on a baseball diamond.  As many rounds as possible in 20 minutes:

Start at home base and sprint between bases. At each base perform an exercise.

1st base = 12 burpees
2nd base = 24 squats
3rd base = 12 360 degree spinning jumps
Homeplate = 24 jumping jacks 

Something weird happened during this workout.  During  the first sprint I noticed that my legs felt extremely heavy - like they were full of pudding. By the last sprint my legs were moving in slow motion.  My mind was sprinting but my feet were plodding.  I didn’t have lactic burn and I wasn’t sucking wind.  It was more like the connection between my brain and muscles had been severed. Sometimes I experience this sensation while rolling but it’s never happened to me outside of the context of BJJ before.

Anyhoo, I finished 5 reps of this circuit in 20 minutes.  I got lapped twice by the two fastest people in the class, which was utter humiliation.   

Doing burpees on a baseball diamond is great.  When you sprawl into the pushup, if you exhale you blow sand into your eyes.  If you hold your breath you get dizzy and fall over on the way up.   

Something pretty amazing happened this Saturday at HBJJ.  We were all chilling at the party that we traditionally have on UFC nights.  (Shawn has a gi-normous TV mounted on the back wall.)  Suddenly, Shawn appeared with three brown belts and promoted Sameer, Warren, and Todd.  The room absolutely erupted in applause and whistles that went on forever.  I didn’t have my camera with me so I couldn’t take any pictures but maybe I can scrounge some up later.  The three new brown belts are exemplary in every sense - not just as BJJ fighters - and it was incredibly cool to see all of their hard work and dedication to the craft be recognized with such a huge promotion.  Afterwards we walked over to Barney’s Beanery and made fools of ourselves.  It was fun.

On a side note, the preceding Thursday I was promoted to blue belt.  I don’t think I really deserve a promotion, primarily because I make so many technical errors.  But I’m not going to over-analyze it.  At my level does a belt color really mean anything? For me the main benefit of promotion is that I can start learning foot locks and other techniques which are off limits for white belts at Shawn’s academy.  

1. Burpee-frog jump the length of a basketball court
2. 50 jumping jacks
3. Burpee-frog jump the length of a basketball court
4. 40 tuck jumps (as high as you can with knees tucked to chest)
5. Burpee-frog jump the length of a basketball court
6. 30 squats
7. Burpee-frog jump the length of a basketball court
8. 20 jumping lunges
9. Burpee-frog jump the length of a basketball court

A burpee is the same as a squat-thrust but in this version you do a standing squat jump after you get up from the sprawl.  I finished in 16:10.   About a minute behind the fastest person.  I don’t like burpees.

I realized I have really bad balance.  I nearly face-planted about twenty times.

I was very tired but I don’t think I’ve taken it to the edge of the cliff yet.  I need to push it a bit more.

On a side note my friend (and no-gi world champion) Alex from HBJJ recommended that I stretch after class and just do a light warmup before class rather than the prolonged stretching I’ve been doing.  I guess stretching takes away some of your explosiveness.  I started doing as he suggested and a lot of my chronic soreness has gone away. 

I went to my first CrossFit class today. It was at 6AM in Rancho Park, which is a big, beautiful public park in West L.A.

First for warmups we did an 800 M run.  Then 3 rounds of

• 10 pushups
• 10 pullups
• 16 lunges

Next we did some light stretching.

The actual workout consisted of 3 rounds of:

• 400 M run
• 30 high jumps onto a park bench
• 12 wall throws of a 6 lb medicine ball over a high wall

The workout was challenging, but enjoyable.  The sun came up in the middle of the workout and burned away some of the haze and I was really grateful to be outside, rather than hunched over a desk or in some crappy weight room.

In CrossFit, you’re supposed to keep track of everything and continually try to achieve personal records.   I finished the workout in 18 minutes and 24 seconds which is pretty lame.  I think I was two or three minutes behind the fastest person.  I think I could shave a minute off just by working harder on the negatives and by making faster transitions.

Anyway, I decided to do CrossFit because I want to raise my intensity level for tournaments.  My other workouts are helpful but they serve different purposes.  I do interval hill runs (5 minutes run, 2 minutes walk) up Runyon Canyon which is a challenging cardio workout.  I also do kettlebells.  Right now I’m doing a ballistic workout with very heavy weights and very low reps (no more than 3) as I’m trying to improve my explosiveness.

CrossFit fills in the gaps and provides very good all-around strength, conditioning and agility training.  Also there are other people around so it’s not as crazy-making as working out by yourself.

It seems that a lot of fighters do CrossFit.  Especially BJJ fighters.  Apparently the “Fight Gone Bad” workout was devised to prep BJ Penn for a fight in UFC.

I’ll let you know how it goes.