I’m so mad at you for getting ezekieled 
In all seriousness though good on you dude, you’re walking the walk which 99% of people absolutely do not do.
No losses, only lessons
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BJJ
12.03.2025 (6am morning session)
BJJ 1hr, all levels class
-working through choke finishes, RNC after rolling from either side, then single arm choke, and a straight choke variation.
-great rolls thereafter. Stuck under P’s mount for much of my first roll. 2nd roll vs J also worked hard in defence, but then got to roll with H (100kg’s vs my 66kg’s), lasted the whole 5mins with him, grappled early, got the takedown on him, let him refine a flower sweep as he was missing the arm across component (let him run that twice during live roll - and got out of the arm bar from him both times), eventually getting into side control then mount on him when the timer went off. Last roll with newbie J3, defended the takedown, closed guard, let him play around with ankle lock, got out of that - single leg x, sweep, into ankle locked him. Then worked through his ankle lock technique for rest of round.
-Coach ran through some points from the weekend with me, not staying so compact once I get the takedown etc. Plenty to work on.
-re Comp, Appreciate all the feedback above guys, I really do!
@twojarslave defo the brain thinking about things then it’s too late. More instinct and quicker reflexes required! That ‘kid cardio’ is a fun factor to fight against… need to bring more old man strength to the battle.
@SvenG it’s a fine year indeed… thanks mate!
@dchris thanks mate, appreciate the solid advice, in some ways felt like I went backwards given the win loss outcomes, but in those first two matches felt like I was there longer rolling so got to work on more things, albeit in generally a weaker spot position wise. There was no masters divisions this comp (well there was, but no one entered in those, hence I’m up against all ages = 16 - 20 year olds predominantly).
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I think I was generally hanging on to survive, when I should have been definately looking for gaps to attack - thanks @FlatsFarmer - I brought in a nice arm drag to takedown this am vs big H, so it’s there. Jamming elbow will to read up on!
@kleinhound yeah that ezekiel… bah! Given previous injuries my brain said tap once it starts getting nasty, when I SHOULD have been able to kick out of that once his bodyweight came up. Suspect I was a tad gassed in the heat. Many lessons indeed! Thanks fella!
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I agree with @FlatsFarmer and @dchris with their observations.
A few more observations after watching your other two matches. You were out-classed technically in all situations, along with being an old geezer.
I cannot stress enough what you did well, which was continue to actively respond to the situation with whatever you could muster in the moment. That’s the fighter’s fortitude Tank Abbot talked about on the JRE podcast that we were discussing my my goon tactics thread. THAT’S the most important thing if things ever get chippy for real, ALWAYS.
Guard-pullers and exotic guards in general always frustrated me under grappling rules. Any guard that gets you clobbered in a fight isn’t on my coach’s coach’s curriculum, and I didn’t become highly proficient in the sport-only stuff on my way to a three stripe white belt at the first school I trained at.
All of that stuff is really important for sport competition, but let’s face it, pulling guard is a shameful way to win anything other than high-stakes competition. All of BJJ competition, including the IBJJF points system, was ostensibly designed to approximate fighting success, yet somehow we have the dumbest thing you could do in a fight being rewarded.
Just keep showing up and listening to your coach. I think a good house to work on building is to have two submission attacks and two escapes from each position that you’ve got well-drilled and “know”. Staying active and switching between the two can often open up the windows for one of your escapes or submissions to work, at least on lower level guys.
“Old man strength” is really patience and calm, even when you’re stronger in an absolute sense. One of my regular training partners was an athletic unit in his early 20’s and one of the best pound-for-pound natty lifters in town. In no-gi especially I always had the most success with holding safe positions with minimal energy while he spent all of his and eventually made a grievous mistake I knew how to capitalize on. He even tapped me out a few times with Judo stuff I just hadn’t encountered before.
There’s no shame in any of it, and there’s a lot of pride to be found in the fighter’s fortitude you displayed. Great work!
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I almost said this but didn’t. The path with jiu jitsu is such that getting better means you aren’t as good for awhile. New techniques open doors, but you haven’t mastered the leverage, counters, timing, etc. so instead of having a new tool, you are putting yourself out there exposed. You have learned new frames and guards, but timing and coordination just needs refinements. This is especially true when facing opponents in competition format who you’ve never trained with.
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I’m very guilty of this. I love inversions, leg entries and playing open guard. BUT,
I also train a week each month where we have mma gloves and can hit each other.
I know you periodically train now outside of a school, what belt are you currently at?
Absolutely this. Calm, feeling your opponents movement and capitalizing on mistakes or timing is key. You can make the strongest/heaviest person a rag doll, with proper leverage and timing.
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Aside from a dozen or so trips to The Academy in Portland, all of my training after getting three stripes was on local, private mats for free. Mostly at my coach’s home but he would also teach a class at the local Karate school once per week. I also had home mats for about a year.
My total private mat time is about the same as what got me my three strip white belt, probably a bit more, which officially makes me a three stripe white belt.
The only time belts came up was when I wanted to enter a competition. If the field was best at blue belt he told me he’d make me a blue belt for a day, whatever that means. The field was nonexistent at blue belt for that comp so it didn’t come up.
My coach wasn’t running a school per se, just running classes among the willing two or three times per week, since the trip to Portland was also a big hassle for him. He has since moved and home mats are no more.
I just do occasional open mats since COVID with no real progression. If I picked up regular training at a school I imagine I’d be promoted to blue in fairly short order. It has been a long time since any white belt has tapped me out, and I tend to get the better of blues.
In summary, belts are sort of silly. You can either do the thing, or not. My coach has been a four stripe brown belt for a decade now, strictly because he doesn’t want to do the black belt test, which is BRUTAL.
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I couldn’t agree more. I hate belts and stripes. I just want to come in, roll until I can barely walk, roll some more, until I can’t do anything but lay down and then go on with my business. Competing for me is just to make sure I’m not isolated in a bubble of training partners, and gives me a date to work to.
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My coach’s coach has the best belt system I’ve seen, and they all have real meaning tied to competence. If I moved to Portland and began training there, I’d probably be accurately graded as a three-stripe white belt with regards to my curriculum knowledge. You test for each stripe there based on ability to demonstrate curriculum technique on demand, and there’s probably about 1/4 of the total curriculum I couldn’t do that for, mostly Judo elements.
Similarly, my coach would become a black belt very quickly at nearly any other school in New England. He’d be on his 2nd or 3rd black belt stripe by now if Jay wasn’t his coach, but then he wouldn’t know BJJ as a combat art like he does, either, because Jay’s the only one who still carries that torch, at least in N. New England.
My first school more or less promoted as a function of mat time, which is fine, but an athletic four stripe white belt from my coach’s school would wreck most blues most of the time. Most schools in Maine seem to be like that, which has led to some tough reality checks when brown and black belts rolled with me, which don’t happen with Jay’s brown and black belts, who own me reliably.
My kryptonite is certainly all of the sport-only traps that I’m not very familiar with, which can make a competent combat grappler look silly. I’ve walked into a lot of those traps, sometimes quite literally with the butt-scooters.
I eventually came to understand that I was my coach’s devious personal side project to frustrate blues and purples who showed up for his open training. Coaching is expected from all brown belts and he sort of lucked into me as a willing and very local student, and I just happened to be the strongest lifter training BJJ in Maine at the time. I knew of nobody who was even in my ballpark of gym lifts.
I am definitely not a typical BJJ student, and I’m forever grateful for all of the private lessons and small group classes I got to attend for free, 5 minutes from my home. A small training partner pool was the only real downside.
Related to our little hijacking of your log, I will also add to this. At my level of what I’d self-assess as basic grappling competence, you will still look silly sometimes when you encounter a person whose game or attributes you aren’t accustomed to. That’s part of why I have such a hard time pinning down the competence of @T3hPwnisher 's opponents, a few of whom might look a lot more like your first opponent if they weren’t in the process of figuring out a total goon like that.
Grappling begins as a difficult to discern landscape, shrouded in fog. Training is how the fog gets lifted by becoming able to observe your surroundings and understand what is happening.
Your fog continues to lift!
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All good chaps, appreciate the banter on this and the tips, commentary and advice. Lifting of the fog, I like that analogy! @twojarslave @dchris
So many good points in the above to quote, I’ve reread them a few times already, appreciate it!
…
Routine chiro last night & massage on the elbows etc, what I thought was angry tendons was actually the small muscle in between the radius and ulna near the elbow. Both elbows are feeling better for the massage already.
Some kind of lift or vest walk planned for lunch today.
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Weighted vest walk (work gym)
13.03.2024 (1pm pre lunch session)
16mins incline dreadmill with vest (10ish kg?), HR122 max, nasal breathing only
Some lat pulldowns, cable curls, BPA’s, banded curls after - short session between many work commitments.
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BJJ
14.03.2025 (6am morning session)
BJJ 1hr, all levels class
-single leg x, into heel hooks (can’t use as a white belt but great to learn)
-2x solid rolls. Made P work hard for the takedown, grappling and focus there improved vastly today. J hit plenty of combo’s on me after. Then worked some N-S techniques and mounted triangle technique
-resting HR59
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Great work!
I am intimately familiar with a lot of the challenges you talked about. During my competition days, I was always the oldest in my group, usually by 15+ years at least. The higher up I went, the more size started to become an issue as well. Nothing nefarious like MMA-style weight cuts, mostly just 20-somethings filling out on the way to becoming men. But it added to my list of concerns every time I stepped up to compete (white through brown).
I like the fact that you are competing so much - even here it appears that you got three different “looks.” That’s valuable. Ideally, especially early on, you are competing enough that individual mistakes in individual matches start to matter less and the overall arc of what you want to do on the competitive mat starts to become apparent. Most of the mistakes you make in white belt and blue belt matches will be corrected simply by becoming a purple belt, so to speak. Competition can accelerate that, and I think it will happen for you.
There are more specific thoughts I’m happy to share. To your point about “aggression,” I think having a certain intentionality might go a long way in that direction: ensuring that you are always on a path toward a certain goal, however intermediate. Grappling is so kinetic. It can very easy to get sidetracked into activity - or the lack thereof - that is non- or counter-productive. Against younger, arguably more athletic competitors, this can be costly.
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@burien_top_team glad you popped in mate, appreciate your feedback greatly too. I definitely found myself just defending in portions of grappling in the comp, which won’t lead to any takedown, compared to having that intention you noted. Keep the thoughts and advice coming here, it’s most welcome! (Hope your shoulder is healing as planned).
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Pantry reno’s pretty much done. So my movement on the weekend was loaded carries and lifting up wall cabinets to fix to the studwork.
Nothing like domestic construction when it’s 40deg (100F+) outside, and going in and out etc. Good times.
Now just awaiting the LED strip light shroud (hopefully arrives in a week or so), and skirting boards remain.
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Lots of progress there, mate! Looking good…
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Looks great man!
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Shoulders (work gym)
18.03.2025 (1pm pre lunch session)
Mobility warmup
Ido Portal’s banded shoulder routine (10partial reps with a 10sec hold for various lateral raises, extensions, etc)
OHP
Bar x 10
30kg x 8
40kg x 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
-ss-
HLR x 10, 10, 10, 10, 10
-ss-
20kg KB Swings x 15 x 7 sets
Rear delts
7.5kg DB’s x 15, 15, 15, 15
BPA’s various angles x 40ish
Fascia stretching - pec/shoulders x 2.5min, then achilles/hip flexor 2.5min L, R
-deep tissue massage Sat am. Elbow soreness apparently coming from the shoulders, so working through some routines, stretches, plenty more to work on those.
-ohp solid as post that warmup, once to keep in the rotation for sure.
-thanks @shaneinga it’s almost finished now.
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BJJ
19.03.2025 (6am morning session)
BJJ 1hr, all levels class
-countering side control into closed guard, with the target of gettinga triangle on our oppoent.
-3x 3min specific rounds, then into 3x min rounds.
-good rolls, lasted the whole 5mins vs T who was valiantly going for some kind of spine crank on me, but couldn’t get my arms free. Ok vs P, then copped a few taps vs J, all defence all the time again. Need to get back to some beginner classes to get more attacking roll time!
-resting HR58
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Mace
19.03.2025 (6pm - on the set of the living dead)
My masseuse suggest giving the mace flow movements a go, to help build shoulder strength and stability.
So cue some research, and a ton of great vids out there.
Made these the other night with junior. Cost was minimal. A few screws into thru the pipes at the end, then cast that into some concrete.
These are about 3kg and 5kg in weight and seem fine for beginning with.
Worked through some basic flow movements for about 20mins or so - certainly got the heart rate up, forearm/arm pump and worked the shoulders too.
Example on how to start - via the flowing dutchman (he’s got a heap of great vids)
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