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Thread: Geezer's Long March Toward the Elite Sneaking Up On the Finish Line

  1. #1231
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    May 2010
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    Food is much easier than sleep these days. The only thing I have going in that department is that unlike a lot of guys my age who grouse about having to get up one or more times a night to take a leak, so far I don't have that problem. (knocking wood as he harks back to his Druidical forebears momentarily)

    My hands and shoulder keep going dead on me and the tingling wakes me up. I lay there grumpy and wondering what Hell I can do to not have this keep happening. I have three pillows under my head to try to keep a neutral head, neck and upper spine and it doesn't seem to be working lately. Then there is the ever present brain gallop that has things running through my head like that damn boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  2. #1232
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    Get a thorough and vicious massage?

    Personally I always felt that sleeping on the floor in my office on just a sleeping bag did good things for my back.

  3. #1233
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    Weight: 245

    Another crappy night's sleep with the hand throbbing from time to time. But I went in to jujitsu anyway. We have a new purple belt who moved to Irvine from AZ where one of Master Bellman's black belts, Patrick teaches. Also a brown belt and a green belt showed up and we all three got grouped together. This was a welcome change from working with teens half my size and strength because both of these guys are not exactly young or small.

    It's becoming an increasing source of bemused comment that I am not easy to move even when I'm not actually resisting. "You're going to have to give Mark's shoulder a harder smack than that to move him off balance, OK?" The first one didn't even slightly shift me let alone buckle my knees slightly like it was supposed to. So I told him to strike lower and right where the delt joins the pec instead of down on my trap and I was knocked back a quarter step when he also added some real mustard to the strike.

    We worked on some O-uchi gari and Ko-uchi gari takedowns from a straight in approach. I've known these techniques for nearly 40 years but I used them at the end of a 4 throw combination. So I had to adapt to someone being more stable than staggered from two preceding throw attempts. This was where the strike to the shoulder came into play as part of the off balancing.

    During the demonstration of one of the techniques Master Bellman commented that no matter whether a strike is a linear straight punch or a circular roundhouse strike once it is stopped or blocked and is locked up, any resistance becomes linear. This hit me some resonance so during working on the technique itself I had a sidebar with one of the other black belts to explore what that actually meant. So we used a roundhouse strike to work through it. Sure enough, once the roundhouse had been stopped my arm locked up tending to move to a 90 degree angle where the strength curve is greatest. This happened not only when the line of force extended out through the fist but also if the line of force extended outward from the upper arm bone as if you were using the forearm to hold someone off after the strike was blocked. I'm still working my way through what all the implications of this are in my head. But it seems to say to me that circular force can applied until some serious resistance hits it and then the brain, muscles, and CNS defaults to linear motion. I know this is true for strikes and am still working through the corollary for pulling. I do know that once you get linear resistance you can defeat it with an elliptical pull or a 45 degree linear one.

    All in all a really good session. Plus my hands feels a little better.

  4. #1234
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    Weight: 244

    The hand got progressively better yesterday and so I had a better night's sleep, praise be. This was of some concern because dips would have been damn hard to do where it was hurting.

    5 minutes warmup on the bike. (3's week)

    Dips: 3 sets of 8 with 20 lbs. Smooth as could be.

    Hammer Curls: 3 sets of 8 with 115. Also good.

    Squats: Sets of 3, 205-230. Set of 4, 260. I did these in the power cage and discovered that squatting to real depth bangs the bar off the safety rails when I set it on the 4th hole from the bottom. So time to drop them to the 3rd.

    Finished with a GXP. The lifting portion alone was 30 minutes long with an average HR of 144 bpm, for 90% of MHR.

  5. #1235
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    Weight: 248.5

    5 minutes warmup on the bike. (3's week)

    Standing Overhead Press: Sets of 3, 110-125, set of 7, 140.

    Barbell Row: Sets of 3, 160-185. Set of 8, 205.

    Claw Grip: 2 sets of 5 with 220.

    Back feels good again and the lft hand is nearly fully recovered although I could tell the claw grip on the left was a little weaker than usual. I have discovered a series of bruises on my right upper arm and torso. Apparently the Saturday session of jujitsu was a little more intense than I thought when I was getting grabbed and smacked to get me moved off line.

  6. #1236
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    Quote Originally Posted by tertius View Post
    Get a thorough and vicious massage?

    Personally I always felt that sleeping on the floor in my office on just a sleeping bag did good things for my back.
    I like sleeping on a hard floor when my back sore.


    Mark- are you icing?Using water therapies? I wouldn't get a vicious massage- id hit a place like this:

    Www.spaworldusa.com. And let the joints float and relax a bit.

  7. #1237
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    Well, there you go. Defer to the expert! Especially when he says you should go get pampered.

  8. #1238
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    We had a jacuzzi for some time. It finally croaked to our great dismay. Too poor to get 'er fixed.

    If I slept on the floor the damn cats would crawl up on me and suffocat me. Rita's not all that big but Max a huuuge neutered gray tabby must weigh nearly 30 pounds. If he got on my chest it'd be curtains for me. Curtains, I tell ya'.

  9. #1239
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    Weight: 248

    Did a running GXP this morning and forgot my bloody pager and cell phone at home. So of course I got paged and it woke up Dearly beloved who was mightily pissed at me for my featherheadedness waiting for me when I came in the door all sweaty. No jujitsu tonight, lots of work related things to take care of for a day or so. Hopefully Friday will have me lifting again if I can lift my nose from the grindstone.

  10. #1240
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    starting strength coach development program
    Weight: 246.5

    Demanding week at work. Thursday had me in at O-dark 30 and on my feet all day. After about 3 hours Mr. Back started getting very unhappy. So unhappy that I creaked out of bed Friday morning like the Tinman of Oz and figured that power snatches would snap me in twain. But Dr. Laura, she of the magic hands set me mostly right later that day.

    So off to jujitsu where I got paged halfway there (again!) and had to run in and take care of some matters. Missed half an hour of the session. Once there though it was a great session with more revelations about movements, joint angles, strength curves, and weaknesses that have some direct cognates in what Rip teaches in lifting form and linear movement against resistance. I got paired up with another brown belt and we alternated practicing with each other and helping teach the lower ranks.

    The real AH HA! moments came halfway into the session when Master Bellman started demonstrating some escapes from ground techniques when the attacker is attempting a mount. In the first, the attacker gets a mount and reaches down with one or both hands to choke, punch, or grab the defender's front. Any of these are linear attacks. The defender drives their hands inward over the center line and then upward and outward over his head. This pulls the attacker forward and down in a face plant and pretty unstable. Then the defender goes to work on hooking the left leg with his right leg and then wrapping around the left arm with both hands and pulling the elbow down as he rolls hard his right while doing a left side upward hip thrust. Done with the right force and timing it rolls the attacker right off.

    Another escape was much the same but included a push of the left leg backward right where the knee meets the mat. That's where the push needs to be for the best leverage. A 3rd technique added the use of a quick roll to the right by the defender to offset the attacker's leg and balance before they can fully settle. Then the defender gets a knee under and inside one of the attacker's legs and forces it outward and back.

    I began to see to angles playing a roles in the breaking down and weakening the strength of the attack by the 2nd technique. Then a bunch of things fells into place. The joints on the human body are strongest and most resistant when they approximate a 90 degree angle. But open that angle up or close it down to make the angle more acute or obtuse, and the strength begins to leak out of it like air from a punctured tire. That is eaxactly what was going on by shoving the leg back at the knee level. It opens up two 90 degree angles of the leg at the knee and the hip and makes it very hard to support or resist any force brought to bear on it especially from a side lateral roll. The same is true with wrapping and pulling down at the inside of the elbow to collapse it into a very acute angle that can't push well and definitely can't project linear force in any meaningful way to stop a side lateral force or roll. Finally, the biggest light bulb popped when I realized that turning the upper leg's femur outward and backward opened up a more obtuse angle of the femurs in relation to the hip or pelvis than can effectively exert force or resistance as well. Kind of like looking at turning the knees out but not too far out in the squat and keeping them tracking in line with the feet. SS:3 pgs. 46-47 and 57 show. But interestingly, too wide produces a point of quickly diminishing returns.

    The last bit of the class had the other brown belt and I doing Phase II drills with 5 minutes of attacks of any kind from one and defenses and counters form the other. This began to escalate in intensity until we were getting very close to full on sparring on strikes, chokes, joint locks and the like. I was trying to damp myself down but as we got into it we went at it harder and faster until the black belts cooled us down with the admonition, no more strikes. This got us back on a more even keel. Great session for all that it was 103 in Northridge this morning. I must have lost 10 pounds.

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