Practice Adversity

Hope it’s unnecessary

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

- H.L. Mencken

Reflecting

I walk to work.  Each day, I’m just a bit disappointed by the idyllic little Connecticut town’s low crime rate and resultant irrelevance of my recent Jiu Jitsu enthusiasm.  So it is entirely possible that none of the specific techniques I learn will ever be applicable to my daily life.  But what is applicable: practicing hard, uncomfortable things.  Getting in adverse positions and staying calm.  Maybe I never need that practice.  Good.  But sooner or later it will be the most important thing, maybe the only thing that matters.

I tried to stay present in the moment, so rarely had my phone out, but am now grateful that others recorded everything so that I can borrow their videos to review the lessons from Origin Immersion BJJ camp.  There is a ton of content to remember.  But without going over tapes, there are a few that stood out to me:

Rolling with lower belts

• Keep your thumbs in and fingers close so that a white belt berserker doesn’t jam one of your fingers.  They’re (um, we’re) literally out of control.

• Protect your midline.  That’s nose, jaw, throat down to organs.  Let whatever happens just happen on the outside.

• Keep breathing.  If you need to reset, swallow once and then breathe deeply and slowly.  If your opponent is tiring faster, you’re winning.

Rolling with higher belts

• They observe everything, including weight distribution, for weakness.  If you weigh 185 lbs. and they feel 175 lbs. of weight somewhere, then they know that somewhere else has only 10 lbs. and they will toss you like a rag doll from there.  If you’re heavy somewhere, then you’re light somewhere else. 

• They give you openings.  Not to be nice so that you learn.  But so that they can coax you into doing what they want.  I was learning how the knight moves and they were three chess moves ahead.

• Sometimes you’re just trying to survive.  The chance that I’d submit a long-time blackbelt was exactly zero.  Could I tap him out?  No?  Could I survive for five minutes?  Also no.  But the latter was less unrealistic.  Just work on something and get better. 

Fitness for jiu jitsu players

• Prioritize squats.  If I want to get bigger and stronger (oh and I do) then the heavy back squat is unavoidable.  That needs to be a big focus for more lean muscle mass/testosterone/BMR.

• Lift slower.  I need more time under tension.  Not applicable to CrossFit WODs under time, but I need to drop 10% of my weights and go much slower for hypertrophy.

• Train harder.  I can train a lot harder than I think I can.  When I’ve had enough, I have more left.  Set aside everything else and just do that one thing.  Jason Khalipa describes the AMRAP mentality as identifying your focus, working hard on just that one task, then switching to the next focus.   

Training

I woke up ready to train:

This morning’s white board:

21 - 15 - 9 - 15 - 21

• Cals on the rower

• Toes to bar

• Wall ball 20 lbs.

Then we wrapped up with a cash out with four rounds of a 50’ sled push and 8 hammer curls.

Next 5 AM run:

Fueling

There were free Barebells protein bars at the gym.  Macros pretty good with 20 g of protein and 220 calories.  Flavor fine and texture good, especially the coating which is reminiscent of a Crunch chocolate bar.

Supplementing

As summer activities wrap up, it is time to start thinking about your vitamin D strategy.  If you’re going to be out in the sun less as we head into September, make up for it with a supplement.  Meanwhile, the FDA had a little moment of leniency during Covid, but appears to be back in business of cracking down on performance enhancing pharma.

Measuring

I joined Whoop to monitor my health stats.  What have I learned so far?  My respiratory rate is 15.1 RPM, which is in the normal range for breathing; I’d like to slow it down and breathe deeper.  My resting heart rate is 47 BPM.  Improving my cardiovascular fitness would reduce that.  My stress is low in the evenings, moderate during the day, but high during CrossFit WODs. 

Recovering

Well I don’t like this at all.  I thought I had a complete night of sleep and woke up rested and ready to work.  But my new health tracker says that I was in bed for 8:20, needed 8:14 of sleep, slept for 6:42, and got 3:49 restorative sleep.  I recall being awake a cumulative 5-10 minutes so this is surprisingly bad.  What I call 8 hours of sleep, Whoop calls less than 7.   

Graston scraping has helped my post-jiu jitsu camp recovery.  Later today I’m heading over to Telos Sport and Recovery for cupping and acupuncture.

Closing

Train hard.  Eat clean.  Sleep enough.  Don’t overthink or over complicate the rest.  If you are already doing the basics well and want to improve, you don’t need to go onto other stuff.  You can just do them better.  Train harder.  Eat cleaner.  Sleep more.  Jason Khalipa emphasized the first to me this past week.  I’m good on the second but could be better.  And the third might be worse than I thought if Whoop is right.