July update

Numbers

Weight: I finished last month at 162 lbs, aiming at the end of this month to be somewhere in the range of 160-170. By the end of July, I was hovering around 165.

BJJ, musculation, cardio: Stayed on top of weekly BJJ training even with the traveling at the start of the month, although I found I had less time and energy available for musculation and cardio than I expected - but still stayed on top of my minimum weekly goals and even managed to ramp up musculation by the end of the month.

Cruising mindset: Weight maintenance has felt good. I think I’ve definitely had the cruising mindset for musculation and cardio, that what I’m chasing is the amount for retaining my current capacity rather than chasing new gains even if that will be the happy result. For BJJ I’ve found myself way more ambitious this month, dreaming of becoming an amazing grappler, but also feeling quite good about the grappling skills I’ve already developed over this last year.

Reflections

165lbs is a bit higher than I was aiming for as the month went on, but it was definitely within the range that I had set for myself and considering all the circumstances of this month, I do feel quite good about it. I was feeling less motivated to keep my calories low so I did let myself eat until I was full in the first part of the day and just tried to eat modestly in the evening. It’s pretty amazing to me that eating like that has still allowed me to keep such a low weight. I’m sure that in late August or September, when life is more back to normal for me, I’ll be inspired and able to press a bit harder on the calorie restriction. I do really like that at the moment the weight I can float at pretty easily is 165ish. That’s already quite lean and healthy, and it puts me within striking distance of new lows if I ever want to attempt them. (I really would like to try to see 157 one day, which would put me at half as much as I weighed at my heaviest.) I’ve also been able to be consuming a lot more protein this month than usual which hopefully will help with the muscle growth.

I’ve had some good experiences at BJJ this month. I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of what combat training can be, when your body is adapted to it and your skill surpasses some certain minimum threshold. It is really fun, and it feels like a powerful bonding experience with your training partner when you have someone whose skill and capacity and especially character are agreeable. It’s a funny thing, because you could imagine doing these same movements against someone you despise with the goal of preventing real harm from them or even causing harm to them. Amazing how the same thing can be both extremes, both sides of that experience, intense friendship and trust or just as easily enmity and hostility.

And like I said, I’ve started being more ambitious with BJJ than I have been before, I think. Previously I wanted to improve at BJJ but I felt somewhat halfhearted about it since the goal was really to develop mma-worthy grappling, for which only some of BJJ is really relevant, so I’ve felt divided in my goals there. But I had a real mindset shift this month where I realized that I want to be an extremely capable grappler within the style that I’ve adopted (which I characterize most fundamentally as a turtle-over-guard style - anytime I’m on bottom I’m fighting toward being belly down rather than belly up, and the minimal time I spend in guard during a roll is oriented toward that goal of getting belly down, getting off the floor, getting on top). I want to be able to win that version of the grappling game against very good grapplers. I think such a skillset will be really fun for me to work on and really effective in any sort of mma or real world fight context. That’s been a fun and exciting shift.

I think part of the fun I’ve been having with BJJ lately also has to do with training partners. Some of the people that I had least fun with seem to be not showing up as much recently for whatever reason, and as I’ve been improving and we’ve been getting some new people starting in the gym I feel like I’ve become more middle of the pack at the gym rather than the person who gets beat up by everyone in every roll, which has made things much more enjoyable and which I think has also allowed me to start developing and improving more rapidly.

For cardio I’ve been moving away from more hiit style workouts to something more like repeated sprint training, while keeping the number of burpees and the overall time commitment roughly equal. So I went from doing 30 second work windows (ten burpees at a time) to 12 second work windows (five at a time) to ten second (four at a time), with the rest windows getting proportionally smaller as well, so that the overall workout still takes about eight minutes. My theory is that this shift should still push the aerobic side of things pretty hard while also giving more of the benefits of sprint training. I’m a fan of the sweet science of fighting podcast/youtube so I’ve been trying to adopt some of their recommendations to my own circumstances and constraints. It continues to translate really well to BJJ and feels very good on the mats.

I think one thing I’ve been thinking about wanting to experiment with is some shorter cardio sessions added into my week as well; so if I do my one eight minute one but then try to do also some three or four or five minute sessions as well on other days, days when I might not have had the time or energy for the full session. I could imagine that being really beneficial for my cardio, allowing me to improve more quickly without adding too much extra strain beyond what I’m already doing. I’ll experiment with that this next month and see how it goes.

I’m applying to the army reserves. Exciting news! I’ve been really excited about that recently. I have my fitness test coming up next week, so we’ll see how well my year plus of resistance training (sorry, musculation, I keep forgetting) and year of BJJ and few months of hiit / repeated sprint training translates there! Although, I hear it’s just pass/fail and the minimum standards are pretty paltry so I don’t know how much information I’ll really get from it. We’ll see.

Predictions

I think I like this 160-170 lb goal so far; let’s aim for that again this next month.

BJJ, musculation, cardio? I think I’ll just keep going with my same goal of weekly minimums, and if I can I’ll also explore the extra, bite-sized cardio idea I mentioned. I may do a bit of a taper/deload before my fitness test but probably not anything too drastic.