This last stripe marked the last stage of the blue belt journey before the next stage of the Gracie Black Belt experience, Purple belt. Right afterwards, a brown belt, told me that I needed to step it up on everything. I agreed. As of right now, I needed to get in a lot more classes.. I had been doing a lot of technique class and less with the practical, sparring and advanced techniques class. I hope to get in a lot more time with sparring in the next six months.
This week in advance grappling, I learned advanced pinning techniques from the mount. When I wrestled in high school, the coach always told us to have body on body. Use your body weight to pin the opponent. Well, I learned to use my hips more. I also learned my lower back was very weak and not very flexible. However, I am confident that my lower back can be fixed just like my shoulder injury but it will take time at the yoga studio. One thing I like about Jiu jitsu is that it is forcing me to look at my aging body and do something about it. Another technique was to drive the shoulder, from the mount, into the face of the opponent and pin their face on the mat. This would make it very difficult for the opponent to move much less bridge to the other side. I have been forgetting to do this
One thing that I need to practice more is tightening up the neck and chin down to slow down a choke attack. In fact, if anyone goes near your neck for a choke, tightening of the neck and chin down, should be automatic.. I always try to put the chin to my chest if I know the choke is happening, judo technique from the 70s that I learned, but the neck tightening is new and difficult to do. I didn’t learn that. You don’t shrug the shoulders while tightening the neck. . I haven’t fully mastered the technique.
Perhaps some of you have noticed my weight loss. Three weeks ago, I went on a super intense fast. I went without eating for five days. I would drink lemon water with maple syrup, or coconut water, whenever I got super hungry. In the mornings, I would do a salt water flush. Another thing I did was work out. I would work out and acted like I had eaten a big meal. I did lose 10 1/2 pounds. When the body couldn’t get energy from food, glucose, sugar, it would switch to energy from fat, ketones. This ketone energy helped mankind survive famine or days without food. The fat conversion to ketone energy process will happen if you don’t eat after 14 to 16 hours. The human body can go without eating for 30 days or more. It will consume the fat before it will consume the muscle. I wasn’t going to take the diet that far where it would damage muscles.. I don’t recommend this to anyone and it may not be safe.
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