Day 4 - Chokes, Breaks, and Counters

Well, it's 8 AM on Tuesday morning and I am so sore, I can barely move. Last night we learned about Chokes and a couple of Counters to being Choked. Which, I for one, think is a much nicer alternative to the sleeper-holds we were being taught. Those of you who are or were at one time involved in contact sports and think I'm being a wuss about this, you're right... growing up as a swimmer meant that if you made contact with another person, you were doing it wrong. So I'm sure I'm going to get used to all this activity, but for the time being... damn...

So we started off with a bit of review from last week -- trying to trip somebody, but now with an added level of difficulty: your partner is just not cooperating and letting you trip him, so you're supposed to grab his collar and choke him out with your wrists (counter intuitive to what I might have first expected). My partner for this evening is on the wrestling team at the local university here in town, so he was pretty quick. And strong. And not being particularly cooperative when I went in for the choke which meant the Great White Ninja had to step up his game last night against opponent Ninja Wrestler. You know, it's kinda a weird feeling, telling somebody "Oh, you don't have the choke right... get a little more under my collar..." and then your next thought being something along the lines of "Well, I guess he figured it out" as you're trying to tap out letting you opponent know that the world is quickly going dark (but not too frantically because you don't want anybody to think that you are being a big baby in jiu jitsu class).

The next move we learned was to break up contact with your opponent. And then throw his ass on the ground. This particular move is fun when you are the one doing the throwing, but when you are the person getting thrown, it kinda sucks. You may be wondering -- how many times do you have to be thrown to the ground before it gets crappy? The answer is 8. 8 times before you groan after getting up and have to catch your breath before you run the drill again. As it turns out (and I didn't find this out until after the fact), there is a technique you can use when you hit the ground so that you don't knock the wind out of your lungs. I'll be trying it out on Wednesday to see if it really works.

So, I was hurting pretty bad after that little round of lessons and was thrilled to learn that our next skill would be how to keep that from happening. In my first "Ah ha! The tables are turned!" moment (and the fact that at this point in the evening, I was pretty desperate not to get thrown on my back anymore), I'd venture to say that this was the easiest Ninja Move that we've learned to date. Just to clarify, when I say easiest we've learned, I of course mean when your partner is helping you pull the moves off. Once your opponent starts putting up any resistance what-so-ever, these things get really hard to do. My opponent for the drills/sparring was a quick little kid who bless his heart could not get the leverage he needed to flip me. Of course, on the other side, bless my heart, I wasn't quick enough to grab him to end the little fight. In the end, I was able to beat the little guy, but it wasn't pretty. Nor was it using proper form. I was tired and wanted to stop. That sparring was definitely the most winded I have been in a years.

So I'm thinking about stepping up the training. I am signed up for the "basic" level of training which gets me 45 minutes of lessons twice a week. The next level -- "black belt" means an hour of lessons twice a week and 3 hours on Saturdays. And apparently it'll get me more articulate on what the official jiu jitsu terms actually are. I get a free trial for the rest of the week, so we'll see what happens. Any thoughts/comments/suggestions would be appreciated.