Tag Archives: alec baulding

Jordon Shultz and Alec Baulding: 500 Reps Per Drilling Session

Posted on by
Reply

I stumbled on the following video blog post from Jordon Shultz. He is training with Team Lloyd Irvin and one of his old teammates, Alec Baulding, visited to join in on the hard training.

I know very little about Jordon Shultz except that he is a huge proponent of drilling. In particular what caught my attention is his mention that he just got done with the morning session of drilling 500 reps of his favorite techniques.

That’s the general training pattern I see among many top level competitors, from the up-and-coming purple and brown belts such as Gianni Grippo to the well-accomplished black belts such as Rodolfo Vieira:

  • 3 sessions a day.
  • 1-2 of the sessions each day are focused on drilling.
  • 1 session is focused on hard training, probably because your body can only take so much hard training. Rodolfo Vieira for example doesn’t train hard every day. Some he goes lighter. Nonstop intensity works for many, but not for everyone.

Obviously, amateur jiu jitsu athletes such as myself can’t afford to train 3 times a day, but there is a lot to be learned from the emphasis these guys put on drilling. They are not screwing around either. A drilling session is 1-2 hours of hard drilling of your main techniques, especially as you get closer to competition. I drill a lot (just very basic moves), in fact, more than training, but I definitely don’t do 1-2 hour hard drilling sessions where I get 500 reps in. That’s definitely something I would love to work up to as I progress in the sport.

It takes the right kind of partner to make that happen. The more obsessed you are with drilling, the easier you are to drill with. I find that regular competitors make for the best drilling partners, because stuff they drill is what they have and will be using in competition. They have an urgency and obsession about the drilling process that makes it work smoothly. And it needs to work smoothly if you want to do many sessions of one hour or more a week.

If you want to get good faster, it’s your job to put the reps in somewhere, somehow, sometime.

“I Knew You Had to Slow Down”

Posted on by
1

Watched the Andre Galvao episode of Rolled Up where he mentions that strength training and conditioning is important to prepare for the difference in intensity between hard training and competition. I think no matter how hard you train, competition is another level.

I’ve been thinking about that, considering that I rarely run up against the cardio wall in training, and if I do it’s because I’ve had 2-3 hard matches in a row. I very rarely go so hard that a single 6 minute match in training pushes me to the edge where that quit voice comes out and needs to be silenced. And yet in competition that happens quite often.

That brings me to something I heard Alec Baulding say in an interview about his 2010 Worlds purple belt open finals loss (shown below) that it was the toughest match yet. The quote that caught me was that he was surprised that the guy “didn’t get tired or give up” given his high-paced aggressive passing game.

I heard that and thought that I want to be the guy (in this case, Sebastian Brosche) who pushes the pace. The title of this post is something a great blue belt (Andrew) told me a while back after a good roll. I mentioned how impressed I was at his aggressive guard recovery. I kept almost passing, and he kept re-guarding with a lot of energy every time. He said that he was able to do that because he knew I would have to slow down and get tired eventually (which I did). That’s just it, beyond all the technique, drilling, intelligent jiu jitsu / judo, I have to start getting hard interval training sessions in so that with my aggression (in competition) I can convince the other person that I will never slow down, and they might as well quit.

This is a great match to watch. I first saw Alec Baulding compete at Abu Dhabi Pro Trials (on the same mat as me) against Abmar Barbosa: