Triangles, man. (Martial Arts Nomad/CC/Flickr)

Hey! So this is actually a post I wrote 90% of a couple weeks ago and never bothered to finish because I’ve been working an actual go-to-it job while also freelancing, and also having an Olympic-calibre summer cold. (I met with a client feeling like my eyeballs were boiling in my skull.)

Anyway, reading the mostly-finished post I decided I was still feeling those feels, so I finished it.

So, my first training back from injury, toe buddy taped and all, wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I struggled tremendously. Not only was I a little [more] out of shape [than usual], but it was all lasso guard and spider guard and triangles.

I have short legs and almost zero hip flexibility and sub-par core strength. Lasso and spider are guards that don’t really work for me as a result. Triangles are a pretty BJJ 101 thing that I should be better at, but I’ll really only try for one if my opponent is just kind of handing it to me, and even then, I probably won’t finish it in time.

It was mega frustrating.

But then at the end of the class, I rolled with a higher belt. He’s an older dude, by the relative standards of the gym—maybe 10 years older than me?—and he’s just started teaching kids and white belts. He has a real mellow demeanour. He immediately puts you at ease. Now, that mellow demeanour doesn’t mean he didn’t arm bar me three times in six minutes or something, but we were laughing while it happened, and he took the time to show me how he was catching me over and over again.

It was really nice. It made struggling through an hour of lasso and spider guard worthwhile. That’s why I do this.