MMA and me; day 31

Shadowboxing with resistance bands is much tougher than doing it without. After two rounds of that, we switched to combos, but it was different yesterday, we we're only using our lead hand. Jabs, hooks, and upperhooks were the only punches we threw. First it was 1-1-roll-body 3, then 1-1-5, then 1-1-body 3-head 3. Working combos where two hooks are thrown back to back is challenging. It's difficult to get the footwork, and body movement all dialed in together, but when you do, it it feels so fluid, and nasty. It's like swinging a baseball bat, when you get the best contact is when you have the most relaxed body, and are smooth with your hips. It was a much more technical boxing class, compared to earlier in the week, though the real conditioning work was yet to come.

Jiu jitsu started with pummeling against the fence, and working to establish dominant control. After drilling that for a bit, we did triangle drills, where first we just switched back and forth from throwing up a triangle on both sides. This drill really wears out your abs, but it's great for working wrist control, and getting a feel for sinking the choke in deep. We worked a little bit on the inverted triangle, then we went into the triangle-reverse triangle-kimura-cutting armbar-triangle-armbar sequence.

We finished off class with free grappling, and I was matched up with my brother first, and he caught me with a rear naked choke pretty quick. After that, I eventually caught him with an arm triangle, but it was after an extended period of grappling, and I was a little tired, and Coach Wise immediately tossed me in with another guy to grapple with, who had me in trouble for a little bit, but I managed to get out of it, and finally got him to tap with an americana. I didn't listen particularly well though, and he then threw me in with a fella that weighs over 350 pounds, and though I finally got the submission with a rear naked choke, it took a long time, and with a guy that big, grappling is exhausting. Coach put me right back in against the guy I had just grappled with before the big guy, and though I nearly had him in a guillotine, I got slammed on back, and it just took all the wind out of me, and I finally succumbed to an armbar. I got tapped twice, and got myself three submissions, but it just sucked getting tapped. I know it's unreasonable to expect to be really good at this when I've only been doing it for a couple months, but my competitive nature was starting to get the best of me. I'm starting to get the physical aspect of everything, but I'm still barely scratching the surface of being mentally prepared.