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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

New York, Rhode Island and Words of Wisdom

I'm back from my crazy New England adventure! My husband JJ and I left last Wednesday, went to New York for a day, then spent the rest of the week and weekend in Rhode Island for one of my best friend's wedding. I had never been to New York or Rhode Island before, so this trip was definitely an awesome experience for me.
Me looking windblown and tired in Central Park. ;)
I won't spend much time talking about the trip here except to say that the wedding was beautiful, as was Rhode Island. I didn't get to see much of New York. We only were able to look around for one day and one night. But I LOVED exploring the city and want to go back again when I can.

Here's me with some of my closest and oldest friends from growing up. Robin was the bride. She looked amazing!

Some of the beautiful scenery from Rhode Island. I love Florida beaches, but some of these stretched of rocky beach were breath-taking.

We visited Newport Island and got to see some of the enormous mansions around there. It was crazy! Some of them looked like castles!



Anyway, onto the actual jiu-jitsu talk on my jiu-jitsu blog. Training has been a lot about problem solving for me right now. I can see some of the many gaps in my technique and I have been doing a lot of trial and error to figure out how to handle them. Most of it has to do with transitioning in defense. I know I should be going a certain way but am not sure how to get there.

For example, I've been getting stuck in turtle. I go to turtle a lot when my guard will be passed and I can't invert. Once I get there, I try to either roll out, catch a leg and drive or return to my guard--or attack a leg if I am feeling brave--but usually the person squashes the crap out of me from the top and I have to work really hard to return to my guard or whatever.

I was asking Paul, one of the black belts at our school, for some advice on how to handle some specific problems and he gave me some technical tips for defending my guard differently. But he had some other advice for me about the mental aspect of game that really hit home.

We were talking about having confidence in the techniques I have learned. Yes, there are gaps in my knowledge. But I need to go into each grapple and each move expecting it to work. If I am hesitant, or go into a move half-hearted, expecting it to fail, I have already defeated myself before I even try. I have to admit that this happens sometimes with me. I either don't try something because I am afraid of the risk, or I try it half way. Doesn't work.

Another thing he said was that I need to work on letting my trails and errors just be experiments and not take them personally when they don't work. Basically, I shouldn't judge my grappling ability based off of whether or not a move works every time. If it doesn't work, it doesn't mean that "I suck". It means I need to keep trying and tweak some things. Eventually, I'll figure it out.

He went on to say that letting those negative emotions like anger or frustration take over during a grapple not only defeat me mentally, but they wear me out physically. My adrenaline gets pumping and then I try something and fail, and have this huge energy dump. Then I am feeling defeated AND exhausted. I have had this happen to me several times before.

I tried to keep those things in mind today and it definitely helped.

1 comments:

Georgette said...

Every time we try something in a grapple, it's a learning experience. We're either learning that it worked (but could be better) or it worked (and was spot on) or that it didn't work (and we shouldn't try it again) or it didn't work (but could with some adjustment.) I find that I have unfairly given up on a lot of good stuff because when it didn't work, I assumed it was a blanket "this will never work for me" kind of thing. Now I'm going back to the drawing board and retrying so much old stuff!