APH-2025-077

Overview:

• Quarterly Goal: Emphasize better rather than more or harder.
• Monthly Focus: Bad Position / Addressing Deficits
• Weekly Objective: Upper Body Attacks (arms, neck, back)

Intention:

I’ve been working through some new instructional content from Gordon Ryan on upper-body wrestling / scrimmages and wanted to put that into practice today.

I also wanted to test out a general open mat template that I can use for the following 8 weeks for ADCC prep.

Warm Up:

• 1 x 5 min: technical / creative round

Work:

• 4 x 5 min: competition pace rounds

  • 1-on, 1-off tempo.

• 2 x 5 min: tactical / technical discussion

  • specifically about the above rounds

• 1 x 5 min: bad position back defense

  • defending my back the entire time

Reflection:

What worked well:

• Overall, the hand-fighting and collar-tie systems work very well to wear opponents down; typically around the 4 minute mark they start getting more hasty.
• Even when a wrestler did get to my back (standing) I caused a scramble off a leg attack and we came up neutral again. With a lot of people this would have resulted in a sweep / takedown for me.

What didn’t:

• I have to stay very disciplined as well, and know when to pull the trigger. I can’t get riled up by the opponent getting riled up.

Plan for next time:

• Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish harder cultivation sessions from lower development sessions. Intention is usually easy enough to establish, but distinctions of difficulty or recovery cost / damage are much more nuanced. Tentatively, I’m thinking that if Morpheus tells me I lost more than -10% recovery in the session, it’s “development.” Most grappling sessions cost me 10-20% recovery.
• Simon basically ripped my face off during the back rounds. I got out a few times, but it sucked bad. 5 whole minutes of that was a total different scenario than 1-minute bursts; that I kind of like.

PS: I’ll be adding more videos to a Comps and Seminars playlist as well as Drills, Rolls, Beta playlist for premium subscribers.