The Most Loathed

Wrap up:

Last week represented a bit of a change in focus and a lot of improvement in my health of late. I didn't document my work hours and, instead, allowed myself to work a little less in exchange for naps. It was also a bad week for focus at work but I did get some things done. I began tracking some health/body related metrics more and I think that was a benefit. That included digging out my Apple watch to keep an eye on my sleep and HRV as well as tracking my blood pressure daily. I had expectations going in on what would impact my HRV and BP and I don't think they have born out. So, I'll keep tracking and try to learn some more.

Submissions:

18 or 20 to my count. 18 is good for me. I've never tracked all week before but I don't think 18 is a normal number for me or most people. That's 18 times that people said "you got me". I'll take it but I'll also keep working on it. Arm triangles were not my drug of choice this week, back strangles were. I also saw lot of possible tools for the toolbox this week but I have to make sure I rep them or I'll lose them. 

Documentation:

As mentioned above, a pretty significant change in focus this week but still documenting. I'm going to keep on my current trajectory for the foreseeable future.

Mobility:

Very poor. This is my biggest opportunity for improvement

Kick Off:

• Monday - BJJ. Will I actually do BJJ study hall tonight. I think I will but I have missed it the last couple weeks
• Tuesday - Rec Time and Marathon
• Wednesday - BJJ and guitar
• Thursday - Rec Time, easy day
• Friday - BJJ
• Saturday - Chores Day
• Sunday - Akagi

Submissions - let's go for 16 this week. I'd like to keep taking the back. I'm also working on getting a feel on when to transition from attacking the arm triangle to the back take. I don't have it quite yet. I think I'm staying with the arm triangle longer than I should at this point

Documentation - Sticking with the same thing as last week, BP daily, wear the watch to sleep at a minimum to get HRV and sleep pattern. Let's say 6 x to allow for some weird exception.

Mobility - time to improve here. I have my PT stuff as well as some other mobility work I should be doing but am not. Going for 5 x this week

Saturday

I slept so much.

Friday night I went to sleep around 10 and Saturday I woke around 7 am, which is pretty normal for me. It's 9 hours but normal on weekends. But then after groceries we were both feeling tired so I went back to bed in thee early afternoon for 90 more minutes. Then we both we dragging at 8 pm so back to bed. I think I read until 9:30 or so but back to sleep again until 8:15 ( daylight savings time so still about 9.5 hours. Then, bleeding into Sunday here, I took at nap after Akagi for about 30 minutes. So, 20.5 hours from Friday night through now. 

Sunday

Akagi -I didn't make my 4 needed subs. I got two off of blue belts but  I spent almost all of my time with purple belts and a couple brown belts. The couple of blue belts I rolled with were tough. Taling afterwards, both of them were  4 year blue belts. Not a good enough excuse, I could meet them in a tournament but what sandbagging is going on when you're a four year blue belt? Overall I had good rolls. I think I gave two taps, one to a purple and one to a brown. 

My professor showed up to Akagi today, it was his first time. Man, every brown belt and most black belts saw a new guy and had to test his mettle. I didn't see him give up a tap but I didn't watch every roll. I also enjoyed getting to be his warmup roll. He needed someone safe to warm him up with a flow roll. So we just traded moves and submissions to get him warm. Then a huge, competitive brown belt attempted to kill him right after and had to tap instead. So I hope I was able to contribute to making it safe for him. 

I eft today feeling pretty beat up. I expect tomorrow's HRV to be in the toilet but we'll see. I've taken it pretty easy since. I got a nap, had a good dinner. I've got a sore arm from a bicep slicer I know better than to let happen but did anyway. So, we'll see.

Thursday

No training HRV was in the toilet so I took it easy. Unfortunately, it did not matter...

Friday

HRV was even lower. I don't have enough of a sense of the metric yet to say why. My hypothesis is that because I got into a coughing fit at 11:30 and got out of bed for an hour, it screwed up my sleep and thus my HRV. Honestly, other than a little bit sleep deprived, I feel really good today. So I went to BJJ

Wrestling today

The snap down - from neutral, with inside position, hand fighting. Wait for them to push back, grab the back of the head with the same hand as your lead leg, pull your leg out the way and put their head where your knee was. Sprawl

The double - from the snap down position, you snap but they don't go down, stiff arm the head away, by swimming your hand over the back of it. Drop your level and just catch the far leg as you drive and down they go. 

The guillotine - complete a snap down. Snapping hand places your flexed wrist right in their throat. Other hand goes through the armppit to overwrap your own hand. Elbows tight to the body, walk around the arm you have trapped in the guillotine to land on that hip. through your outside leg over their low back, clear your hands upwards and they tap or go out.

Rolling

Tim (blue) - One tap. Tim is small, fast, athletic, crazy strong for his size. I had to keep hammering away with submissions but eventually caught him on his side and muscle a kimura into place. He must have been tired because he hunkered down instead of fleeing. At this point I did exactly the kimura to armbar I described in my last post. It's just so dang effective

Professor (black) - took two taps, gave three, I think. Understand, I get what he gives. However, I think I caught him off guard today. He was looking for me to go for my usual mounted assault but I'm finding my back attacks finally. Twice I caught him on a one armed choke from the back. Once, is him letting me work, twice is at least one of those of me getting away with something. That said, he put on a total clinic on me on how to use the kimura submission from back. He practically called his shot and made it happen. That is mastery. His other tap that I recall was a guillotine which is something he is very good at. I don't actually recall if he got two or three but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to say three because he can take one more anytime he wants. 

After Class

Alex (blue) - one tap. I got lucky. I had taken his back, he got back to turtle but my hooks where in but I was high. He went for sit out and lifted his head in the process, in went the arm. One armed choke number 3 on the day. Afterwards we talked and discussed having him tripod instead of sit out. It was a split second decision, he probably made the wrong one but this is why we practice. 

Ben (blue) - one tap. Guess what, it was a one armed choke from the back again. Ben fought me hard and I was giving him lots of Shoulder of Justice but I was not sealing the deal from mount. Everyone knows what I want there and fights like hell to prevent it. But, I used my Danaher video knowledge switch my grip, knee pillow to the back and bang!

That's five taps on the day. I'll need to go back and count but I think I'm at 16 of 20 and still have Sunday ahead of me. 

The rest of the day will be very chill. Despite my app telling me my recovery is 31%, I feel 90+%. I have a lot to learn about this metric still. I'm planning to track it through the next challenge and then I'll make a ruling to keep or lose it. I suspect the fact that I'm still recovering from the long term cold, and I still wake up coughing at night is making it less reliable than I want. We'll see though.

Random, not workout, news

The big news of my professional world is Silicon Valley Bank. They are a venture capital supporting bank in, you guessed it, Silicon Valley. They are having what is known as a liquidity crisis. Basically, they have more money loaned out than they can back with their cash reserves. This is fairly big deal in finance but normally I would merely brush it off. However, as one of my team members, who really follows finance news closely, was talking about this I went, wait, I know something. I did that big project over the past month that I complained about, about tracking where our cash was going (nowhere). In the process I invented I was able to find banks that mattered in the analysis based on how much cash they moved or how frequently. I had never heard of Silicon Valley Bank but it showed up in my analysis so I wrote a flag to track it. I had no foresight to this new story, they were just a big enough deal on their own to hit my radar. 

So, when my teammate was done telling the news story, I grabbed the screenshare and showed everyone the last year of our history with them. Cool, we all thought it was neat that we could see how we related to the news story. But, when I got back from the gym my inbox had a dozen new emails andI had slack messages from the teammate. Big wigs wanted to know how much detail I could tell them and how long it would take. So I sent them the detail of every transaction for the past three years and explained that the hooks were in place that I can tie this to a client, branch, advisor, whatever. Nothing new since then but that little project has once again drawn a bunch of (positive) attention. I may have heard the end of it for this once or I may asked to provide names, phone numbers, and account balances, who knows. 

54 minutes ago, Kishi said:

(he also made an offhand comment afterward when we were cleaning up that the head coach doesn't like green gi, and I was the only one wearing green. Which, like, okay my guy. If coach has a problem, he can tell me himself. Also, it could be that I'm misreading that; there was some talk about wearing different colored gi and how wearing red is apparently a power move of some kind and how coach apparently only likes white and blue and black gi as those are the colors he wears, and I just happened to be the one person who was wearing different colors). My last roll was with a younger, more athletic man who outplayed me pretty hard. No two ways about that one.

This is dumb BJJ politics. 

For people who don't know, at some gyms people love wearing many and varied uniforms, others, blue, black, and white only, and others still, there is a single uniform gi. Many gyms will never tell you, you're just expected to get it from the vibe. BJJ, while I love it, has a lot of this dumb culture stuff that you're just supposed to vibe with but then people who get different vibes tend to hate on one another. 

You're correct, if coach has a problem, coach needs to ties his own pants up and tell you and purple belt can take a walk. 

On 3/8/2023 at 3:30 PM, Sovalis said:

I am intrigued by your burger suggestions (a little put off by the egg, because I assume it’s a fried egg with runny yolk and those are gnarly for me) and could totally see pineapple working. I’d even try the peanut butter. Keep it all up!

I can vouch for the runny egg on a burger. It takes the umami to 11.

I always dislike the idea of peanut butter on a burger but the two times I've had it, it's been deeply satisfying. 

19 hours ago, TimovieMan said:

Also, carpooling? 🙂

She'd like that but I never go into the office if I can help it. I told her that I'll ride with her to the office a few times so we can get lunch and so forth but in general, I love working from home. She does not and so it is another benefit for her to get to go into an office.

03/08/2023

BP: 145/90

Recovery: 33%

BJJ

More back attack stuff.  I really like this one, it'll fit well into what I do. From back control with seatbelt, fall to the underhook side. person in front clears the legs completely but not the arms. Person who had back control locks up a kimura on the near side arm and hip escapes until they are nearly north/south, belly down. Use the pressure on the kimura to keep the "front", now bottom, person in place and you climb up to kneeling or crouching in typical Kimura submission position. At this point I'm on auto pilot but just to lay out the rest of the details, go for a kimura in your usual way. For me that's two or three tugs on the kimura then a downwards push to try and break any grip on the lapel. If you break the grip you move the arm behind the back until they tap or their shoulder fails. 

Assuming you can't break the grip we move into armbar. The version I personally don't do is to rotate towards the front of their body. Step over the body with your back side leg then fall backwards to start to extend. Switch your grip to have your head side arm in elbow to elbow and reach for their pants with your leg side arm to break the grip then lean back and square up until they tap or their elbow fails. The version I do, because I don't quite have the mobility and balance for the other version, is the shin in version. Starting from a kimura you can't finish, rotate towards the front of the body and basically kick their low back with your back side shin and fall back. One piece of spice that I add is I keep the kimura locked in super tight and pulled to my chest. I have people tap to this compression lock pretty often. I don't think I can actually screw up their elbow but it hurts a lot. It's also so tight that most escape options are shut down. Assuming they don't tap and their grip still won't break, you now have an extra step to do because of doing it this way. First, lean towards the head, this will create space so your hip side leg can now clear the body and go over. Now you return to center and switch your grip and reach for the pants to break the grip.

We did learn a third option. This one assumes you don't even want to go for the kneeling kimura. So from the back escape you hip escape but instead of getting up you just slide your body over theirs to have the cross body kimura. These are hard to finish and have fewer tricks but you can roll thier body upright and go for the break.

Rolling - 3 taps

Ben (blue) - tap. I was pretty proud of this tap. Ben is nightmare strong especially from the back, which is where we started. So I had to fully escape, take top then arm triangle him.

Josh (purple) - two taps. I frustrate Josh so much We're similar size and styles but he's been doing this for something like five to seven years but is super inconsistent. So in the time that he's gone from four stripe blue to purple he's seen me go from white to blue and from easy money to the one that wins more often. This particular roll really annoyed him but I taught him what I did. First tap he had my back, I escaped, took mount and we switched between me controlling his back to mount several times. I'm getting decent at that. I noticed that when I was transitioning from back to mount he would try to roll away while I had the underhook in deep. I took the opportunity to connect my hands and lay him down for an arm triangle, twice. So I taught him the move, we'll see if it comes back to me or not

Rob (white) - This guy have been a white belt as long as I have been doing BJJ. He shows up for a couple weeks then disappears for several months. Whenever he shows up he's in "super try hard mode" which can be a real problem. As soon as we started he was practically hyper ventilating. I took all my pressure off of him (I do have like 50 lbs on the guy and was giving him some pressure but not a ton). I told him to slow down and breath. I let him work. I never gave him a sub but I treated it like a flow roll or like I do for a lot of new people. I'll let you work up to the point that I think I may not be able to come back from it without a  tap. Then I'll reverse the situation and make you work up to that again.

After Class

Alex (blue) - no tap. Alex is a squirmy one. He wanted me to start on his back, which was generous. similar to Josh I took mount and back to back and back to mount a couple times. He was doing a great job of stymieing me by holding my choking arm forward, when I'm on his back. I knew we had covered this last month but couldn't think of what to do so I'd go back to mount. Fortunately, after we were done he was game for me calling Professor over to help trouble shoot it. I wanted to make sure I got what he said written down.. 

From back control, the front person has gone two-on-one on the choking arm and is pulling it forward so the back person can't strangle. This doesn't solve the problem of having someone on your back trying to strangle you unconscious but if you have a fixed time limit it's an incredibly effective stalling tactic. Option one is to force the front person to clear your arm over their head. They usually want to do this anyway as the next step in escaping. However when they have cleared your arm to the near side of their head, while you can't strangle any more, the two on one grip is very weak and you can rip your arm back then fire it back under their neck to reattack from the same position. In the event that they hang on for dear life and won't clear it or if you just have good control of their lower body and the center of gravity, you can slide your underhook out (near side) and take it over the shoulder to grab their trap then transition them to your other side, dropping them into a strangle on the opposite side. You have given up having an underhook in this moment so you have less control but that strangle is a legit threat so finish it or establish and underhook with what was your previous strangle arm.

This was a great class for me and I need to drill the back to kimura as well as the solution to the two on one a lot.

I was supposed to go get stretched yesterday however, as I went into just warm up a bit a fire truck pulled up to the rec with its lights on. I saw and heard one of the staff jogging with a fire fighter that someone had fallen off of a bike and been unresponsive and that the staff had to shock her twice and do chest compressions. This whole thing was off in one corner so I stayed clear and just did some light rowing to warm up. As I got ready to go do my stretch session I saw the woman who does it standing with the fire fighters talking, looking red faced and sweaty. She and I converged and I said "You look like you have a lot going on. If we need to reschedule this we can. " She looked relieved and explained that she had been the person who had seen the woman go down and had been doing some of the first aid, so I assume she was sweaty from literally doing CPR. Obviously I bid her well and went about my business. Rough day for her.

Today

My HRV says I should chill today so I'm going to. I'll do my PT at midday and do some house chores instead of the gym. I don't feel two beat up but I'm trying to follow the HRV. In truth, I had. a couple G&Ts last night and I'm pretty sure that is why it's messed up. I kind of suspected that would be the case and was very aware of it as I had them last night. I specifically timed them for a day when I didn't have anything major the next day. But, yeah, it looks like alcohol might be a no go for my recovery, which is not a bad thing at all.

14 hours ago, Kishi said:

She had no answer. This helped to reinforce the notion that a belt just keeps the uniform together.

Marathon Monday 

I got about 4 taps and on some of the folks I have been struggling with, Alex, Joe, those guys. My HRV was warning me that I was under recovered so I was deliberately not going at 100%. It's odd how sometimes not going 100% is the right prescription. It frees up the mind the to be more fluid and prevents me from doubling and tripling down. We spent the last half not doing full rounds but 30 seconds to pass or sweep

I skipped BJJ study hall in favor of doing some chores then playing an hour of Breath of the Wild

BP was 153/94

Did not complete PT exercises

Took a nap in the afternoon

Tuesday

Rec

Row, row my boat 30 minutes

Did PT exercises

Marathon

Similar to Monday, took 4 taps then we did 30 second pass or sweep drills

BP was 141/93

Took a nap in the aftenoon

Wednesday

Recovery today is "yellow", listed at 41% (it was in the 80s yesterday). I'm still going to class today but will try to not crush it. 

This afternoon I'll need to make time for PT and I'll try to give myself a nap again. I don't like taking the time away from work but I need to clear this cold I have been fighting for like 6 weeks now so I'm seeing it as an investment in getting healthy and not needing to keep fighting this. 

Thursday will still be a plan row again but take it pretty easy and slide into the weekend on low effort. 

In other random news, Laura finally got a final, formal offer. She had two different jobs on the table and was trying to pick the right one. It turns out, she's going to end up working at the same company I am. Our company is big enough that it's very unlikely we will ever directly work together. I'm just optimistic that she will have a place to work that will compensate her appropriately and give her benefits and satisfaction of feeling valued. I'm about to hit 5 years there myself and I've never done 5 years anywhere. 

My cold recovery is going pretty well. I have a sore throat today, I think just because it's heavily abused from coughing but then also breathing hard yesterday. My cough itself is fairly under control. I use a few unmedicated cough drops (basically fancy hard candy) to manage it. 

I'm still trying to stay focused on recovery. I'm taking my bonus naps. I'm giving myself room to take it easy if my HRV or my body tells me I'm not doing great. I'm staying clear of vices and trying to focus on food from my fridge rather than from fast food or boxes. 

On 3/1/2023 at 2:52 PM, Kishi said:

Yesterday, I got good news! While my ortho does think that my shoulder needs to heal some more yet, he cleared me for "situational sparring" in BJJ; i.e., starting from a position and working out one way or the other. I got my fix last night at the fundamentals class, and did pretty well with everyone I rolled with. Mostly it was just guard work - one person starts out in the other's guard and top person has to pass while the bottom person has to sweep or submit. At least held my own in all three rolls and outfoxed my partner in two of the three. I think I have S&S to thank for that; there were a couple places where I had to grind for what I wanted and I was comfortable doing so in a way that I don't recall having been in recent memory. So. Good times.

This is the challenge of an ortho who doesn't get what you do. You're no less likely to wrench your shoulder in situational sparring than open sparring.

How do you find yourself successfully passing with your teammates?

Wrap up & Kick Off

Last week ended in me being sick again as well as a significant change of focus. However, nothing is truly our of line with what I've said before. So this final week will be a bit of follow up but a forecast for next challenge:

Last Week

Submission: ~ 11 (I think closer to 15) submissions, primarily against peers (not just picking on white belts). I still need to work on what to do when my primary path isn't working but the back has become much more accessible to me

Documentation: meh. towards the end of the week I stopped recording my hours and I did so-so on NF, however, I introduced new things too.

Mobility: poor - I did not do the additional work I needed to this week.  I did, however, see a professional, so I'm excited about that.

This Week

• Monday - BJJ - Marathon - BJJ Study Hall
• Tuesday - Cardio - BJJ Marathon
• Wednesday - BJJ - Stretch
• Thursday - Cardio - BJJ Study Hall
• Friday  - BJJ 
• Saturday - Chores - Hosting
• Sunday - Akagi 

Submissions - Let's go for 20 this week. There's no reason I can't

Documentation - I'm going to let work documentation slide. This week will be about testing and recording BP and HRV daily

Mobility - This week my goal if 5x my assigned glute strengthening stuff from my PT. Extra Credit for looking into Supple Leopard and Deskboard for more glute stuff. 

Tuesday - I've lost the details but I took many, many taps off of my fellow blue belts. 

More importantly, it was clear that I was getting sick again. That makes something like 3 times in 6 weeks which is more than I think I have ever experience. That will dominate my next few days

Wednesday - Definitely sick. I skipped BJJ. I worked per normal. Despite not working out, I took an hour nap in the afternoon.

Thursday - Still sick but doctors visits today

Based on the number of times I threw my back out in 2022 and the fact that I was having some nerve pain I would associate with my disc ruptures from years ago I booked time with a physical therpist

Seemed like an intelligent, well informed guy. He listened, asking interesting questions, then moved my body through some ranges of motion. Basic outcome is that he wants me to work on strengthening my glutes. He gave me some hip bridges and similar type movements that I will work on. It's hard to measure success vs failure but I'll record doing vs not and back issue vs not and just keep plugging away. 

Retest based on my previous GP visit tell me that I had high blood pressure.

BP still high. Doctor wanted to put me on medication. A past me would have said "no" I'll take care of it other ways. My take was "sure give it to me" but in my mind I was thinking, "I don't think this is what you think it is." But I was also thinking, ok, if I'm wrong, the right choice is to get the treatment but also do my thing to try and end the need for medication. So that is where I am. That's a theme that will stick with me for this post and subsequent posts. 

Friday - still very sick, so no BJJ. Sent a text then waving off not just Friday but Sunday too.

Saturday - Chores day. Groceries etc.

The blood pressure thing was on my brain. I started looking at wearable options. 

First and foremost, I ordered a basic blood pressure cuff for home use. I think this freaked Laura out because she saw this as me taking the blood pressure thing seriously. More on that in a bit.

Second, because my personal hypothesis is basically that between illness and overtraining, I think those are more responsible for my reading than any pathological condition, I needed to find a way to try and track and address this. I settled on HRV. I'm open to hearing that this is the wrong call. I'm open to other options but for the moment my goal is to improve my HRV and use it as a guide to when I should train and when I should take it easy. If my hypothesis that my high blood pressure is due other things then improving my HRV should show some benefits in BP. If not, Im free to test it another way but I also need to consider that I simply have high BP. 

I dug around in my box of computer things that I probably need to throw away and found my Apple Watch from a few years ago. I hate jewelry. I don't wear a watch, chains or rings, including a wedding band because they just get in my way. for now, thought, I am committing to wearing the sensor packet known as an Apple Watch. I'll reasses  in several weeks. The likely outcomes are either that I will drop the sensor packet entirely or I'll convert to different one. This was a free choice for now though. 

Sunday - Day one of monitoring

BP was 166/102 first thing in the morning (120/80 is normal). HRV was 15, if I'm reading things right (80-100 is more normal). Per my app my recovery was 40% which I don't totally know how to interpret. My decision was to go to the rec and just walk on a treadmill (it was 15 degrees Fahrenheit [-9C] today). My app pretty quickly told me I was over exerting myself. I turned down the speed and walked a bit longer. Then went and did my PT movements. 

On 3/1/2023 at 3:33 PM, Kishi said:

Man, I'm incredibly struck these days by the relationship of bodies and position. Went over some back-take from guard vs pendulum sweep work and the difference is in where the top partner's head is located. It's truly wild stuff.

Head height is crazy stuff. My professor is a former NCAA wrestler and drills it a ton and prefers to have top position but I've also seen some high level guys do back control on the underhook side, which means you have to stay under their head, preferably body. He can teach stuff from there but it's clear that he really wants to get back to top position. 

Not head height but another wild one I've run into is sweeps where you can elevate their feet. Sometimes a sweep from halfguard ends up in a scramble but if you can hook their feet, you steal their base and force their head low, allowing you to take top positions. 

On 3/1/2023 at 3:33 PM, Kishi said:

Yeah, they do that. I'm facing something similar, having found a hyper-efficient work process that's rendered me super-effective. Boss wants me to demonstrate for folk, and I'm kind of concerned that upper management is going to eventually hear about it, standardize it, and then push us to the grindstone even harder. There's no timeframe for it; just a kind of ongoing dread, but things coming to life beyond my control is kind of a thing I deal with around here anyway, so. I can relate.

It strikes me as very interesting how closely our roles seem to relate. Not quite the same but in the same orbit. 

Early on in this job I tried to make the rest of the team much more efficient by  writing a bunch of macros in a common library that anyone could call. Management loved it but peers hated it. I never pushed, I made them available and wrote documentation on how to use them. About half of them have become indispensable, literally every jobs has to have them or we send them back to the developer, the other half are completely forgotten. You could see people physically resist the ideas when I put them forward so I made a point of softballing the whole thing. I let things slide that I didn't think I should just to not make it too much at one time. I've never brought them all along but I do get occasional messages of "I'm reading your code right now and I forgot how clearly you write everything, I wish everyone else did." It's culture change and it's a slow process

Also related, I once obsoleted myself by converting the entire position into a python script and a spreadsheet. I debated not saying anything and just working a couple hours a day but, in the end, I took a different role and taught my team how to do what I had done. Everyone wins. 
 

Monday Jiu Jitsu

More back control with a focus on hand fighting.

From the back, underhook side down. Back player uses underhook (control) hand to control same side arm and threatens the submission with submission hand. Front player is not scared of the control arm and ignores it but grabs the submission arm across the body to defend it will free his own arm on that side to start clearing legs.

• back player responds by freeing the control hand first by rolling it towards the thumb. This can now overgrip the same side rm, freeing the submission hand to do what it does.
• Of course the front player wants to return the previous grips and attempts to do so

If the leg is ever cleared and the front person tries to roll away to turtle, the back player need to release their grips. The top grip goes to the far hip, The bottom grip is sacrificed the go up to your elbow, the maintain higher head height. Go for putting  your head on their back. Slight hip escape to make room then pull the hip into you to put them back in back control. Bottom arm should be the submission arm, top arm should be the control arm. Depending on inertia you can roll through to the other side.

If the bottom person rolls through and builds to a strong enough base that the hip pull won't work, keep that bottom leg in but go diagonal across the back:

• if the turtled player tried to reguard you have to take a big step over with your top leg to catch him in back mount again
• If the try to turtle up, set up a power half to pull them back to you
  • note, I was going to deep. make sure your leverage arm is across the back of their head and your under hook arm is in no deeper than needed.

Rolling

Ken (blue) - one legit tap, I think it was back strangle if I recall

Evan - I think (Blue) - three taps. He's a lot smaller than me and doesn't come very often so I tried to give him light resistance but pulled a few taps anyway

Professor - gave up two taps the first roll. He was messing around with armbars and not going 100%. Similar, in our second roll he was still kind of messing around, got one tap on me but I got one on him. I think he was confident he could escape my back control and let me get to far before trying to escape. I got a nice double-cross lapel grip and started driving him down by pushing on his hips with my feet and got a tap. He did provide feedback that when I 'm in side control and he rolls to his side, I'm not giving  enough smash.

Jiujitsu study hall

The video today was about handfighting from the back, which is nice. Danaher wants you to take double cross body control of the arms then feed them to your legs. So, starting out on back with seatbelt. Back guy goes for the classic control and submission grip. Assume front playe uses controls side arm to control the submission hand. I use my control arm to strip that grip. Now his submisson side arm is coming over to strip that, I want to release the control grip and catch that hand cross body. Now his control side should come over to defend the strangle. At this time put the submission side arm low and cover it with your leg. Give his one remainin hand to uyour control grip and go for the strangle.

Other Stuff

I obviously never made it back to do my weekly wrap and kick off. Just a busy day. Unlike my first couple challenges back, I'm looking forward to the next challenge switch. I need to work on making space to do things which likely involves doing a little less.  I'll be thinking about this in the next couple weeks as we move towards the end of this challenge. 

Super short version of this weeks plans are pretty much status quo for me:

• Monday - BJJ and BJJ study hall
• Tuesday - Cardio and Marathon Roll
• Wednesday - BJJ and guitar lesson
• Thursday - Doctor's appointment and physical therapy
• Friday - BJJ and spend some time with Laura 
• Saturday - chores
• Sunday - Akagi

That annoying work project has taken on a life of its own. Despite my leadership chain not really being interested, people have heard I can now do this and are asking me to start flagging accounts based on transaction descriptions for all kinds of things. This week I'm rewriting my code to see if I can speed the process up and documenting what it takes to do this. I'm also socializing it within the team in hopes that they can learn to do it too and it's just a new offering from the team.

Laura has been looking for a new job for a bit and thought she was going to end up at my company. Unfortunately there was an interview that left a bad taste in her mouth and she wasn't sure what to do if she got an offer. Fortunately she had an interview with our state's department of health around then. She wasn't super into it since it sounded like she almost had an offer but the interview went incredibly well and it sounds like they will come through with an offer, which I think will be fantastic. This seems like a much better fit. It's also in a domain of knowledge that I'm an expert in so, while I know she can do the gig, I've offered my free consulting. It means that some of the user groups I attend and even the conference I went to last year could be shared events in the future. 

Thursday Jiujitsu study

More mount attack stuff but this time we're taking the back from mount. 

Set up the arm triangle but for any number of reasons you just can't seal the deal, you can't clear the arm enough to strangle. Switch which arm you are using the control. This frees up your arm on the side where you want their hand. Use your now free arm to grab that hand and pull it across. In doing so, you have now exposed the back on that side. Knee pillow and take the back. Do all the back things.

Friday

Double - Secret Jijitsu

Friday is no gi for us. Still working on back retention, this time from the underhook side down. The general gist of this side is quite different than the gist of the overhook side down.

When the overhook side is down, retention seems to be a lot more about keeping them in place so you can really attack the strangle. I think this is primarily because retaining the position demands less from the back person. As long as you can keep control of one leg and their back off the mat, you can attack. With the underhook side down you have to stay under them. So retention is about make space to stay under or completely throwing them off to take a new position (mount or back attack from the turtle). So that's a lot of what we were repping. If the front player can get their head lower, you have to grab their trap and lift to get back under. If they are getting their head lower and you can't retake the back then you sticky hook their leg with your top leg and throw them over and reattack.

Armbar Seminar

A guy at my gym follows a Sambo and Judo guy online, Ivan Vasylchuk. Ivan has been trying to set up a seminar series in the states for a while but has been confounded by Covid, visas and more. But he was finally able to make it happen and my gym was the first stop. Ivan's first language is Russian and it's the first language of the guy from my gym, which really worked out because Ivan struggled a bit with the language but Tony was able to step in as interpreter. I wish him luck on his future stops. I think it will do him a lot of good but I think that sometimes he'll struggle without someone there to here. But, he'll probably get really good by the time he goes home.

The topic was armbars. This guy loves armbars and hits them from everywhere. It was also three hours of instruction and I definitely got some serious mental overload and lost most of it. I think I retained two things:

Platform armbar from side control

From a good side control position, your opponent can give up the Americana or platform in the usual ways but they put their hand low and possibly grab their own belt (this is a defense I use). Take your head side leg over their head and put them in an inverted triangle. Put your shoulder on their wrist then move their hand to your opposite shoulder. Find their elbow and compress it to your body for a break

Armbar from mount

Mount. Attempt to strangle to get the arms up. You basically want a positions where they have crossed their arms over their chest and are hugging their own shoulder. You slide up as high as you can. Choose the top arm  and feed your same side arm down from their head towards you under their arm. switch to that side and flip your waist side leg so you are in the S-mount (curved with foot to wards their head). Bring your other leg across their face and neck and break.

I think I will see this again in my mount videos very soon

Oh, nope I retained a couple other things that bubbled up while I was typing

Finishing the armbar from the standard position -arguably the most practical take away

You want your head side arm to be under your opponents arm. Assume they are defending by locking up. You need to pull on the arm to keep your hips tight to prevent the elbow getting to  the ground. Your head side leg should be over the neck. Always have 4 points of contact, cheeks and heels are first, shoulder blades and heels at the finish. Instead of just sitting there trying to hip hinge back, lay to the feet side to break the grip. When the grip breaks, rotate your body back to the extended four points of contact and hip in to break the arm. There is a defense to the foot side lean and the involves the bottom guy having both arms cross and pressed into their chest. If they are doing this, do the food side first to get your arm into and even better position, closer to teh hands, then lean to the head side to break the grip then finish per usual

There was one nugget of how to attack a spinning armbar from your opponent stiff arming you. I can't quite extract it but I may work with some of the guy who were there and see if we can recreate it. 

Saturday

Chores

A nice day of doing chores. Nothing in particular to add right now

Sunday

Akogi

Crazy busy. A couple of new schools sent multiple guys for the first time. It was interesting to see that the new schools really didn't stack up to the regulars. I hope they keep coming just for the experience. Thanks to the new schools I got 7 taps, 4 off of blue belts, 3 off of white belts. I gave up 4 taps, two to a black belt, one to a purple, and one to an unknown no-gi giant. 

Something I had in my mind as I rolled was trying to start cycles of attacks. Even when I'm in guard, trying to make sure they are reacting to my pass attempts and not doing what they want. Then when I pass, starting my mount series immediately and forcing them to defend. Once I'm mounting, aggressively going after the arm I want. If it's not happening, going after the back and swapping back to mount to back to mount with multiple submission attempts in between. You can just tell from the look on their face, even if I don't get the submissions, that they are exhausted and falling further and further behind. 

Pausing here to start my workday but I'l be back later today for more

Bandwidth has been low of late and the first casualty has been NF.

Life hasn't been bad, just busy and as is always the case, things that aren't in the pattern are the first casualties. It's ok.

Two thoughts before I go back to my regularly scheduled day:

I can't find it anywhere official but prior to our current snowstorm I was seeing that we were 9 inches away from our snowiest winter on record for the Twin Cities. I'm hearing anecdotally that we got about a foot of snow overnight. If both of those things are true, this is the snowiest winter on record (note winter, not year). It's been and interesting season for it too because I think every storm we've had has started on Tuesday and gone into Thursday. This one is no exception. 

I've gone out an shoveled each time when I would normally go to the gym. Today, as I prepared to go out, my neighbor was kind of screwing around at the end of my driveway with his snow blower. I assume he was just trying to clean up the mess that the snow plows make at the end of all of our driveways. Then he turned his blower towards the house then blew out the entire driveways. He probably saved me 90 minutes of work. Super nice of him. Then I saw him start doing other peoples' driveways then I saw all the other guys with the big, gas powered blowers get out and before long, everyone's driveway was clear. Super nice of them all. 

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned New Zelda Hype, well, I am fully enthralled in waiting for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to drop in May. I don't generally follow video games. I play a bit of Minecraft and watch some content creators for it. I have a Nintendo Switch and go through spells of playing stuff or not.

However, I'm enough of an old that I had an old school NES when they were cutting edge and I had the gold cartridge Zelda when they dropped in '87 (that's what wikipedia tells me the year was). I haven't played all of the Zelda games but I played the heck out of the original then played the heck out of Ocarina of Time on the N64, and a bit of Majora's mask. When Breath of the Wild dropped a few years ago, I think it was almost the entire reason I bought a switch. I played through it, bought the DLC, played most of that and then put it down.

Now the Tears of the Kingdom is around the bend, I find myself jonesing for some BotW. I've started putting Twitch streams on during my work day to allow me to eavesdrop on people playing the game. The last couple nights, after work and whatever minor chores I am doing, I've spent about an hour each night playing BotW.

It's weird to find myself obsessing over a not-yet-released game, knowing full well that I'll play it from May to July or so and then not care for a bit. 

unusual update for me but wanted to at least get something posted. Back to work for me. Tomorrow is a special double jiujitsu day but considering I haven't don BJJ since Monday, I'm ready. 

5 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

I'm forced to wonder why they care where the mo ey is going and if that information would actually be useful for anything other than satisfying curiosity. 

I don't believe it would help. 
Basically, investment firms make little bits of money off of cash sitting around by having it available all day should you want to make a trade. When the market closes they quickly deposit all of it in a savings account at a bank. In the morning they wake up to .00001% interest made and move it all back into their cash accounts and take the interest as revenue. It's the Office Space bug but for real. Because savings is tied to the federal interest rate, when they saw the interest rate go from effectively 0 to pretty close to 4 they got excited about what this could do for revenue. They did their public filings with this on their mind. Fast forward a couple months and they found that they were not keeping up with expectation, by millions of dollars per month. People in windowed offices want to know what happened. 

Basically what happened is that our advisors did their jobs and told people with big chunks of cash that when the interest rate was 0 it was ok to just let cash sit around but now you're silly if you've got a million bucks that could be earning even 2% interest if you put it in something super low risk like a treasury bill or bond for six months or a year. Are customers, being the clever kids they are, took that good advice and stopped sitting on cash. However, no one accounted for a smaller pile of cash in their estimates for the year and rather then just doing a face palm and admitting they missed a variable, they want to assume someone is doing this to us. Some competitor has set out to grab all. the cash by offering incentives.  In fairness, some firms are offering a percent or so on cash just to incentivize clients holding cash with them and feeling less urgency to move it out but there's no obvious mass migration, I've been able to demonstrate that.

If we knew there was a mass migration, what would we do? Probably nothing. We could try to match the competitor's offer but we could do that anyway. I proposed we just give half of the interest to the client always. That way we're offering them an incentive to keep cash with us but we always get a a little off the top.  It won't happen because people are greedy and see that as "our" money. 

Honestly, at this point, I suspect people are just pushing me to see how far I can take this project. They didn't think we could do half of what I have done in two weeks. I think they're just curious to see what I can hand them. I'd be ok with that if we said that and took our foot off the gas a bit. I have other projects I've parked for this and I want to wrap those up and have said so. If they want to get serious about this one, we should pull back and make a plan but I think that they think that doing that will kill the project, it won't. Part of me feels like I should tell them to knock it off and let me do it later, correctly, but a big part of me likes to make people happy and wants to seem clever and will keep pushing forward even in frustration. That's a me problem and I know it but it's hard to reframe my brain under pressure.

BJJ lessons from the week - I tabled these above for time reasons.

From back control, with a seatbelt, falling to the overhook side

• They start to flatten out and escape - top hook becomes a sticky hook under their top leg. This is enough to stall out the escape for a few seconds, reattack the neck
• Same as above but the few seconds you can hold their leg up are passing, kick the leg over, flipping the opponent face down. you may need to let your grip go but can keep the underhook arm in place, holding the trap. Depending on the opponent's response just take the back again or take mount
• From the start position and the bottom player escaping, long hook. If. you can shoot under and reset the back attack do that.
  • Assuming you can't, use the underhook to stay connected, use the top leg of the long hook to hook your heel in and rise to mount
  • Or drive your chest into his shoulder, keep that underhook arm and plow them to their side (this works well with the kick method above). You want to have both of your legs on the same side of the person's body (I kept going to mount but you don't want that here) . Drive their face and top shoulder into the mat. Wrap up the giftwrap and take their back

Using this toolbox on FridayI was able to maintain really strong control for top, just taking back to mount to ack to mount. I'm looking forward to trying it out at Akagi on Sunday.

I've been super busy this week and I'm falling behind on posting/keeping up. Before I do my bookkeeping, why have I been buys?

I mentioned this a bit last week but it's continued and I'm going to take a minute to ramble.

tldr: I built a thing that I have been told they assumed was impossible. But I let it take over more of my life than I should and I'm a little sassy that they are kind of running me in circles to  find the answer they want, not that one that presents itself.
 

 Ok done whining

Wednesday 2/15

BJJ

Going to skip notes here, I'll talk about them when I talk about friday

I took a nap in the afternoon for an hour because I couldn't focus

Thursday

No rec - only work

I was crashing hard that night. I could barely stay away. I tried to write a post for the day but just couldn't focus. I didn't do any BJJ study. Instead, I fell asleep at 8:30 or 9 while Laura was out doing singing or plant stuff, I forgt.

Friday

BJJ no-gi

lessons from Wednesday and Friday, because we did a lot of the same things in gi and no gi

ok, have to table this because it's Saturday morning and Laura is ready for errands. I owe a break down on techniques for the week. I'll try to post it tomorrow.

Rolling

I'm not going to detail all my rolls partially because I don't recall them all. the overall theme is that I a controlling extremely well. I'm beginning to rain down attacks on them but I'm still not quite getting the tap as often as I should. The number of rolls where I dominate and only get them set up as the buzzer is going off is frustrating. Also, the white belts are scared of me (the ones that have been around longs). I've been told it's because there is no solution to my game, that I just keep coming and wear them down Well, yeah. So they just get in my guard and lock out their arms against me and try to weather the storm. So I need to find a way to make my guard not a safe space for them anymore. 

• Stan (black) - I got, what I think was, a legit tap. We traded. Since we're working back control, I started on his back, moved to mount because I prefer that. Worked it for a while but wasn't getting what I wanted, retook his back and pulled off a one armed short choke. Basically, sitting behind him, I have one arm under his arm, controlling that hand. The other arm is wrapped around his neck, hand grabbing the trap and I pull my elbow back for the tap. In fairness I will also say that when he started on my back, he eventually got to mount and got me with a kimura. 

Other notes:

• Tonight we're off to hang out with friends we call "The Hyphens" They each have different hyphenated names. So, when I talk about The Hyphens, that's what's up
• Today I'm buyin some plants for my office. I owe pics later
• I have been sleeping better the second half of the week. I need to talk about that
• just another reminder to self here to document lessons for the week.
• New Zelda hype

Just now, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Did you ever fall asleep? Have you woke up yet?

good timing. working on an update as this came in . Appreciate you keeping me accountable

02/14/2023

Marathon Roll

1. Ken (Blue) - 0 taps. Held mount but next quite got the arm positioned
2. Charlie (White) - 0 taps. Props to Charlie. I couldn't pry his arms away from his body. I tried and tried I should have gone for a different strangle
3. Dan (Brown) - 0 taps. I started on Dan's back and he was never able to completely clear me. Dan is much, much better than me so I count this as a win
4. Professor (Black) - 1 tap given. He was letting me work so he didn't take more from me.His tidbit was that when I'm trying to get peoples' arms away, I'm going straight up not out
5. JD (Brown) - 2 taps given. JD sees me as a challenge and will take any taps he can. 
6. Mislail (white) - I had been told by professor to roll with some white belts to make sure getting reps on tapping people. Mislael was my first victim. He's much smaller than me but trying to be competitive. He has the problem of trying to do the new meta all the time instead of learned one solid package of techniques
7. Carter (white) - it's Carter's second week. It didn't seem fair to just tap him. He also seemed kind of uncertain. So I told him to take mount. If I got on top we'd reset, he didn't have to worry about me tapping him. I climbed up four or five times
8. Joe (Blue) - 0 taps. It was close. I was mounted and he was trying hard to throw me but I kept mount but his efforts prevented me from getting the tap
9. I forget - I should have one more here because I did ten rounds but I genuinely can't recall who it would have been. 
10. Unnamed (white) - at least three taps. I can't remember this guy's name. People don't like to roll with him because he's super heavy and not very good so he just lays on them. However, prior to this round I couldn't get a partner. I looked around and I had rolled with all the upper belts. The white belts wouldn't meet my eye for the standard challenge. I put my hand in the air, the universal sign for "I seek a challenger". Nothing. Finally I pointed at this guy screwing around in the corner and pointed at him and said "you". I got the "me" points to self. "Yes, you." I gave him any position he wanted to start, he took mount. I tapped him and we went again.

Take away

Based on Monday I was more patient in mount and never got swept from mount. Now I need to work on getting the arm triangle set up more efficiently. It's slow and steady to get those all the time, easily

Tap Counter 7 - 3

I have a hypothesis that has entered my brain. Last week, at my doctor's visit  my blood pressure was high. I will fully admit to eating terribly and particularly salty leading up to that. However, I also suspect I am in an overtraining state. I'm having trouble sleeping more than 4 hours at a stretch while simultaneously being exhausted at night and having trouble staying awake to a normal bedtime (for me). I'm going to keep my training schedule the same but may try to ramp down the rolling intensity 20% and see if I sleep better, feel less generalized fatigue and other things. 

5 hours ago, Kishi said:

 

I feel this in my soul. A lot of the issues we've had with my job lately have been tied to a bunch of people wanting simplified, magic bullet answers to a bunch of processing statistical problems and how they're tied to our incentives. Thing is, there actually is a simple, magic bullet answer to our problems, but nobody with any authority wants it done. 

 

But hey, that's huge that you found the answer. And even if they don't care now, they might just as this new process iterates and improves, and you'll be the one who gets to take credit for it. That's really cool.

Ugh. sorry to hear that you have the same currently. It'd be nice to imagine a fantasyland where that's not the case but there's always a little something. 

The latest ask was, could I send a timeseries to some mucky muck of all the tokens in a certain category. I can but there are two challenges. 1) there is no definition of said class and 2) If I use any definition I can make of said class, there are between 20 and 50 groups, which makes any visualization noise. I asked for clarification and sent and example to the request of what it looks like without us choosing. a much narrower definition that they are comfortable defending. I guess, the one good thing I will say is that of all the places. have worked, I trust my peers and leaders to at least have a conversation like that when I say we need to have it. I've been other places where they just dig in their heels and nothing gets done. So that is a bit of a victory.

BJJ - maintaining back control and finishing from there. 

• from back control seatbelt, falling to the strangling arm side - elevate your head by coming up to your down side elbow. Once up there then grab the lapel. To arm goes underhook to grab the opposite lapel and pull like a clock choke style. Draw the down side elbow back, tricep extension on the top side. Maintain chest to chest connection
• Set up as above but you catch them trying to switch their hip down. Top side leg gets a sticky hook (toes pulled up) to briefly elevate their top leg. This makes it hard to turn the hips down. You can't maintain this forever but it's good to buy a little time to set up the strangle
• Same as above but they ball up (I tend to do that) so you can't really control the leg, hook your top leg over the top and connect your feet then extend your body, hipping into them. This not only opens the ball up and sets you up for hooks but also can expose their neck nicely 

Rolling

• Rob (blue belt) - back control to escape or submission, it's allowed to go from back to mount without leaving the drill. I think I tapped rob 4 times. This was just a gift to my weekly tap counter. Rob's a pretty soft blue belt, I've got 40-50 lbs on him, probably close to 6 months training, and just whole lot of physicality experience on him. He escaped once, I think, but since we were allowed to transition between back and mount, this whole drill was kind of built for me.
• Ken (blue) - I got one tap an him. I really felt he was letting me work. Ken is my uke for privates so he knows what I'm working on and was able to give some good feedback on the arm triangle, which took several attempts to dial in
• Time (blue) - 0 taps exchanged. Tim is really small, like under 150 but he's crazy strong and fights hard. I thought I was going to get him but he was not going to give it up easily. I couldn't pry his arms away from his body for long. I went for the smother but there just isn't enough time in a 5 minute round to smother someone with spirit. 
• Josh (purple) - I gave up an embarrassing pressure tap at 10 minutes. Whenever Josh makes it in, he wants a roll with me. I had a good run of tapping him for several months but the last two he's taken. As much as he feas my half guard, he's gotten good at shutting it down by pinning my off hand to the mat with one hand and keep his body weight position over me. In each of the last two rolls I have mounted him and made a pretty good go at strangling him but he eventually succeeds at getting the reversal and I don't have a good answer in that moment. Then he pins me down for about five minutes, trying to grind me down. This time he eventually got mount and just got heavy and eventually fear and lack of room to breathe beat my mind into submission and I tapped. The lesson I think I need to take from that is to be more patient when I'm on him. There's no reason to chase the strangle on him, I can hold the position and make him give up the pressure tap. I've done it before. 

Tonight is supposed to be BJJ study I really just want to go to sleep so I'm letting it slide. I won't be attentive. I'm using my check in here to both catch up on peoples' threads but also just to keep myself from going to bed too early. 

02/06/2023 - 02/12/0223

• Monday - BJJ, marathon roll 2 of 3, BJJ study night
• Tuesday - Rec Time, Marathon roll 3 of 3
• Wednesday - BJJ, assisted stretching
• Thursday - no training, first general check up in years
• Friday - bjj
• Saturday - no training
• Sunday - Akagi

Sub Count

Given 5 Taken 16

Documentation

Poor

As I got busy at work I occasionally forgot to start my timer. For example, below, for Thursday I worked a long day but was so heads down I didn't start my timer.

Additionally I stopped posting here for half of the week and lost some of the details from my private lesson due to not documenting

Mobility

I got in only two sessions. The first was only ten minutes, the second was the hour of assisted stretching

02/13/2023 - 02/19/2023

• Monday - BJJ
• Tuesday - Rec Time, Marathon Roll
• Wednesday - BJJ, Guitar Lesson
• Thursday - Rec Time
• Friday - BJJ, Date Night In
• Saturday - Rec Time
• Sunday - Akagi

Goals

• Submissions
  • 20 submissions taken, fewer than 10 given.
  • I want to pull at least 5 submissions off my fellow blue belts (purple belts counts for this as well)
• Documentation
  • post here on 5 separate days
  • Log at least 25 hours of work time
• Mobility
  • 4 sessions of at least ten minutes
  • 2 of those sessions will have to be done at home, not coinciding with rec time (something I haven't succeeded at yet)
  • 1 hour of working on what my movements will be

Play us out

BecauseI grew up in the 90s

fell off the wagon a bit this week on keeping up. I'll explain towards the end.

02/09/2023

No Rec time today. I'll explain some work pressure at the bottom.

First physical in at least 3 years...because of pandemic but also moving

I went into this physical assuming all things would be normal, per before, but wanted to set up conversations on back health and get my GP established after all this time.

My blood pressure came back very high 150/90. There are probably at least ten namable reasons why it may have been high this one time. However, it could also be real. So I'll be back in a few weeks to test again and we'll just see. Not gonna pretend it's nothing but not gonna stress about it. I mean, all the things I should do to improve it are all the standard stuff so. meh. Hard to have feelings.

02/10/2023

Private

I did not get an opportunity to record these right after my private so I worry that I have lost details

The arm triangle from mount:

• Clearing the near side elbow
  • Walk hips down to hip on hip then walk up to clear arm
  • Same as above but they get the elbow in, attempt a compression lock on the elbow. Head side hip down to compress forearm into humerus. This can cause a tap by itself. This also prevents any kind of a hip bump when I choose to mount
  • pass north south, make miserable until either of the above two work
• Mother's Milk (suffocation)
  • move to high  mount with a good single elbow wrap. For your non-wrap arm come past the tricep to wrap a hand around the side of the face. This allows you to turn the face up. Place your body over the face and keep them face up until they stop twitching
• Arm triangle
  • Can not be executed from high mount. That was one of my big take aways. 
  • Single chest wraps, but take yourself further down than feels natural 
  • Dismount and ratchet down further as needed then put them down

Class

So I disrupted class a bit. In my private I mentioned needing to work on armbar escapes. We ended up doing that for class.

Starting from the arm bar in place, top play has at least one arm elbow deep, legs across the chest and head

• Pop the top leg up - I usually set this up prior to the armbar even being in place but assuming my hands are connected and I'm resisting, job one is to pop the head side leg over my head come up into their closed guard. Not a great position but several degrees better than one I was in 
• Hitchhiker - so the are starting to separate my hands. The arm bar hand goes thump towards my head and I try to put it in their pocket then rotate feet to feet and escape
• There was a third specific one here but I'm having trouble calling the details to memory. The gist wast, an armbar doesn't work if my elbow is free so. Anything I can do to drive my elbow to the ground can save me. But I think there was more nuance than that.

09/11/2023

Chores and errand. I was also feeling my vaccines from Thursday so I skipped the rec.

09/12/2023

Akagi

I don't think I got a single tap. Also, I almost exclusively rolled with purple belts. Also, I've been in a weird mood lately. All week I felt more like escaping than dominating so I gave up my back, neck, and arms to everyone. Other than the one black belt I rolled with, no taps. 

tap balance: taken 0, given 1

Work stuff

This week I got pulled of all of my regular work and put on a project that amounts to "everyone wants to know where money is being transferred to, all we have are the vague description field of the transaction, can you do it"? I honestly didn't know so I set out to see if I could do it. I settled on a method used by AI for Natural Language Processing, call tokenization. The idea is that you break out all of the pieces (words, letters, numbers) and see if they tell you anything. Unfortunately, no one I know has ever done this before so I just had to invent it from a mere concept. Weirdly, I succeeded. I built an entirely new way of processing data for which we had no system before and I did it in 2-3 days. 

I ran into a few challenges. My system is not efficient (it's brand new, I wouldn't expect it to be). To run it on one month of data take 4-6 hours. It generates something like a million rows of data per month. In the future that would be no problem as we'd screen for some things up front, cut some things out, but it's brand new, so it's a lot to deal with. The other challenge is that in this process they want me to find a magic bullet as to why these transactions are occurring. From a gross level, there is both and obvious reason and no obvious reasons. The obvious reason is cultural and no one likes it. The non-obvious reasons are in the data. There is not magic bullet in the data but it fits the pattern of the cultural reason(s). 

So I created a whole new system that we can use over and over and improve on but also, no one cares because it doesn't deliver the magical answer. 

Anyway. That was a huge push this week and kept me from sparing the mental cycles to come over here and post or keep up.

That is all.

Back tomorrow to set up a new week

On 2/7/2023 at 3:07 PM, Shello said:

Following! 

wilkommen

02/07/2023

Rec time

Concept 2 30 minutes

TRX 15 minutes

stretching 10 minutes

Marathon roll - I didn't write down my rolls and it's about a day and a half later. I could probably go back and recreate the list but this time I thought the broad themes were more important. My first handful of rolls were my tough ones, a couple brown belts and the better blue belts in. the room. I could feel the fatigue of three rolling days in a row adding up as well as the lingering malaise of whatever this cold  or whatever is. I gave up one tap to each of the brown belts and traded with the blue belts. Once I had worked through the competitive people in the room I found I just didn't have any drive to wail away on the less challenging folks and instead I wanted to play a different game. So I started letting them take my bak and forced myself to work out from the there. Once I got free I'd just give up position again until they got my back again and work back out. 

So this marathon roll will hurt my tap count for the week and wasn't on focus for my goal but was still productive in its own way.

tap count

Given 4, taken 4

02/28/2023

BJJ

New month, new topic, submissions from the back. Today we began our focus with how to recover when you have back control but they're getting away.

• Long hook - From back seatbelt (or saddle as some call it), fall to the overhook side. The person flattens their hips to start escaping. Connect your legs around their waist to draw them back in. unlock to plant your bottom leg to bring their weight back on top. Then take them over so your overhook arm is on top to set up the strangle
• Short hook - from back with the seatbelt, fall to the overhook side, the flatten their hips and start to get away over your bottom leg. Plant our top leg between their legs, keep the seatbelt, come up to your elbow, pivot your grip towards the ground and bring your center of gravity over their shoulder, smashing them down. Bring your bottom leg up behind their back. Roll to your butt, pulling them into your lap to set up the strangle. It also looks like you're set up for a nice armbar here.
• Kick - same setup as before but they escape even further away, mostly over your bottom leg. You have to still have the upper body under control or this won't matter and it's time to do something else. Top foot hooks under their near leg and kicks away, throwing their hips away. . The recovery is the same as previous, come up to your elbow, pivot your grip to the ground, bring your knee up and roll across to the strangle.
• Bonus armbar - your in the strangle with danger arm on top. The go for the defense of pulling your arm over the top of their head. Use that arm to frame the face away, bring your leg around to take over the frame, keep the arm for the submission

Rolls were just to the escape from the back. I rolled with Ben and Ken. No submissions were had but this is good practice for my meets this year as that is one of the possible overtime conditions.

Tap count 0

9 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Following again.

Welcome. Welcome!

12 minutes ago, KB Girl said:

Boring is a good idea more often than I'd like. 

 

Are you continuing with those lessons? Or just making your own plan for now? 

A bit of both. I still have my work thing (Hinge Health) and I still have nine more pre-paid assisted stretch sessions but I got the vibe that she is not really going to help me come up with a plan. So I'll do those but I think I can add some stuff from my own resources that will help as much or more. 

Oh, I almost forgot

BJJ study tonight

I wrapped up video 4 which is the finishing details on the arm triangle (kata gatame). I already have some details I need to go back and revisit but those will be for another time. I think that Thursday we will start working on the back take and submission series which I'm looking forward to. I'm terrible at back control and this is part of the overtime rules for my May and August meets so I need to drill it.