Back at it ... kind of

So the holidays are over, and I took two weeks off. Totally off. I figured this was the time I would spend healing away from the mat, so I might as well totally relax and come back in anxious and ready to get going. It worked ... kind of. The day before my day back I did a light calisthenics routine so I wouldn't shock my body the next day. Then my morning back I did another light routine with my medicine ball for the same reason. That night I spent 90 minutes grappling and 60 minutes kickboxing ... then got sick overnight.

It's not that well known that an intense workout can degrade your immune system for up to 72 hours. I knew that, and I knew my wife was sick, but I figured I'd risk it. Kind of stupid in hind sight. Probably should have been stupid in *foresight*.

At any rate it was fun to finally use my legs in the kickboxing class. Up until Monday night I was just doing hands only because I didn't want to stress the graft I have in my knee from ACL reconstruction January 2009. It takes a full year to get 100% and tai kicks pull directly against it.

Pulling kicks out of a kickboxing workout sounds like it should take away roughly 50% of your arsenal, but it's closer to 75%. The fact is when you learn to use your knees, elbows, feet and hands together you come to use each for feinting and setting up other moves. Once you yank a piece of that holistic pie it kind of wreaks havoc. You can really feint with a low kick when you explicitly asked your training partner to just box for the sake of your bum knee. Neither can you work one kick a few times and then change it up to throw him off. Pure boxing was surprisingly boring, though I leave room for the possibility of that stemming from gigantic 16-ounce gloves making most attacks easily blockable.

I remembered quickly how much I rely on my lead leg. Specifically I love to snap out those lead-leg push kicks, but instead of bringing the knee up and shoving outward in a push, I snap the ball of the foot upward into the stomach. The former is a technique to keep people away from you, and it might hurt. The latter is an attack. I accidentally dropped a guy with it, and I really did pull the kick.

The BJJ class was interesting as well. I worked with a new student. Only four classes prior to Monday night, but with the caveat that he literally weighed about 100 pounds more than me. It's helpful to work with huge guys sometimes for a variety of reasons. Monday night it was helpful in that it made me focus on minutiae of basics - things that work against a 200 pounder don't work against a 260 pounder. You really have to nail the technique, and even then certain things just aren't going to work no matter what you do.

As retarded as it sounds, I was doing the most basic hip escape from mount incorrectly. After about 4 years of BJJ I was performing something I learned the first month wrong. /sigh The key to getting your legs back between you and your opponent with this escape is to leave one leg (right leg for this description) flat, and use your left foot to reach across your flattened right leg and hook your opponent's foot. Then pull his left foot over your right knee, THEN bring your knee up. Once you get the first side done you'll be in half guard and can hip out real quickly to get your second knee free and replace guard.

I was trying to use my right elbow to create enough space to force my right knee up between my opponent's legs and get to half guard. This tends to work ok against people my size, but as I mentioned above, against someone about 100 pounds your senior ... this sloppy garbage just doesn't cut it.