The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
End of Summer BJJ Journey Thoughts
-- Belts are dumb. I've reached the point where I can go with a lot of the blue belts in the gym... by the convenient expedient that the gym recently promoted a whole bunch of guys to blue belt. I'm still barely touching the guys who were blue belts last year, but a lot of the new ones I can roll even with, and some of them I've been catching pretty well lately. I'll say this here on the anonymous internet: there's a couple guys I really don't think should have gotten promoted at all, they're just not that good, I beat up on them consistently. I don't feel like I'm anywhere near knowing enough to get any kind of promotion, and I kind of hope I never do, or at least not for a long time. The belt system invented in Judo has been brilliant marketing, it's been adapted all over the place from the Six Sigma to Krav Maga, even a pretty simple sport like Muay Thai has some kind of fakakta armband system, because it works, it sells, people put in effort to get the belt as a certification of their skill level. The attraction of concrete standards of advancement is irresistible, but on the margins like any classification it is pretty meaningless.
-- More and more I'm trying to find the moves that work for me and hunt them. At first I overindexed advice not to force stuff, and wound up trying to hit the absolute optimal move my opponent was giving me, and constantly trying stuff I only half knew how to do. Now I'm taking more of a flow chart approach, where in every spot I have one or two moves I'm comfortable with that I aim for. And that's lead to way more success, not just with the moves I'm aiming for, but seeing openings appear for moves that I couldn't hit before. For the longest time I basically never hit armbars, I'd try to drop one in and lose it, to the point where I got gunshy trying them because I didn't want to lose postion. Instead now I'm hunting americanas from the moment I get into side control, and in the process I chase them into a position where the armbar is right there on a platter for me. This is probably wildly obvious stuff, but I had to learn it the hard way, because I'm stupid.
-- I've realized that every matchup is decided in half guard for me. I'm actually pretty decent at stealing back half guard from side control or mount, or pulling half guard on the way down when I've lost the takedown battle. And all my passing game is station-to-station, passing to half guard then passing from there. The game gets decided in half guard, if I can escape from half guard to a better position I win, if I get stuck in half guard I eventually lose. So I've been trying to study more half guard techniques and try them out. Part of the problem is again passivity. Just making a point of fighting as soon as I get to half guard to get to a knee shield is a huge improvement, where before I tended to settle in and let myself get flattened. I feel like with a good half guard game, I'll be much closer to my goal of being able to give a good roll to everyone in the gym.
-- My standup game is embarrassing to me. I'm getting good enough to stall for a while, but I'm having very little success getting people down in tough rounds. When I do get anyone down, it's more that they pull guard because I've achieved a dominant position and they want to get it to the ground. I've been doing well with arm drags, and pinch headlocks, but I need to finish. And I've still yet to hit a shot successfully. Another area I need to improve and be less passive.
-- On the bright side, I've come home grinning ear to ear after a few just soul stealing wins over guys who thought they were better than me. On the one hand I'll do anything I can to help this guy out, I give guys rides home, help them move, give stuff away in the gym group chat, I love these guys. On the other hand, there is no better feeling than watching the disappointment and anger fill his eyes after I snatch the ankle lock when he didn't see it coming. Watching someone pack up and leave after falling into the kimura, because they're just so disgusted.
Nice. Stealing those perfect wins is just so satisfying. I'm still riding the high of one particular sacrifice elevator I hit on a dude half a decade ago. I don't even know what I was thinking, I never practice that, but it just happened and all of a sudden I was in mount. I'm about to check out a new gym for my first class in years. Time to get pretzeled :)
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