Okay so I struggled to come up with one for ‘I’, and this is what I could think of. If you guys have a better suggestion that you’d like to see me tackle, please leave a comment and I’ll give it a shot!
Under the umbrella of Intelligent Training there can be lots of different aspects. Whether it’s about taking care of your body, listening to it when it needs to rest, or whether it’s about the way you approach the time you spend on the mats, it’s important that you approach your training in a logical way.
Know what you’re going to do
This one might sound fairly obvious, but you should at least have a vague idea of what you want to achieve before you step onto the mats for the days training. If you’re going to class, clearly your instructor will have something planned for the lesson. If you know what this is before hand then great – figure out what you want to focus on from that lesson. If you don’t know what it is, then focus on a general part of your game that can be applied to all different lessons. This can be things like improving your basing, working on not getting swept, working on gaining and maintaining the underhook, perhaps hunting for a particular type of submission. Only you (and your coach) know what specific part of your game needs to work.
Keep tabs on what you’ve done
My blog is the way that I do it! Clearly this isn’t going to work for everyone. So whatever floats your boat on keeping tabs on your training is the way forward. Whether this making notes, taking photos (with your training partners permission ofc), or whatever else you can think of, it’s good to keep track of what you’ve been doing so you can go back over what you’ve done before. It can be very easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of material that your coach covers in class, but by keeping tabs, you can always revisit something that you didn’t quite catch the first time around.
If you’re injured know what you can and can’t do
We’re not invincible, even if we like to think we are. Sometimes are bodies just give up on us. Hopefully not in a way that will have a long lasting impact, but it can still affect your training and your game in the short term. It’s important to take a break when you need to, but also not to push something that doesn’t need to be pushed. I’m am nowhere near suggesting that I can give any medical advice. But it’s pretty damn obvious that when you’ve pulled a muscle in your leg, you shouldn’t be doing strenuous exercise on it, otherwise you’re probably going to hurt it more.
If you’ve got a training partner then team up
I think this applies more to me, as a female BJJ player, than some of my male teammates. The reason for this is that whilst there’s a lot of guys who are probably around the same weight, finding a BJJ girl who wants to compete who is a similar weight can be like finding a needle in a haystack. I’m lucky in that there are a lot of girls at Kaizen, but not all of them are interested in competing. I do have several excellent training partners though, and we try and coordinate our training hours so that our open mat time coincides. Michael suggests that this is the best way to get better for competition. Just roll, roll and roll some more.
I suppose that most of you will probably have your own training regimes and little things that you do which will keep you happy when you’re on the mat. These are just some of the things I keep in mind when I’m approaching my next class or open mat session.
Until next time,
B
Girl On A Mission 