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Yes they do. It’s not fair that the martial arts people have all the fun. The CrossFitters get the super cool themes… like July’s theme: bagel jokes.
I mean, also we focus on two movements for 10 weeks at a time, test on the first week, do work for 8 weeks, and then retest on the 10th week but that’s the boring stuff. Bring on the bagel jokes.
SW Portland Martial Arts Blog
Do the CrossFitters Get a Theme?
July 10th, 2024July Striking Theme: Lead Hook
July 9th, 2024
If those wrasslers get to have a theme, then the punchy people should get one too… and so July became the month of lead hooks.
Although throwing a good punch seems like it should be easy, it isn’t. It takes years of practice to get good at all the pieces that add up to a quality strike and even after all that, if you’re just practicing into the bag then you probably will still be lousy and figuring out when to use it in sparring or a self defense situation.
Putting aside the harsh truth that any movement art takes time and effort to get good at, let’s just look at this strange fact instead: the lead hook is going to be thrown with your non-dominant hand. This won’t always be true, of course, you might be one of those oddballs that plays in the opposite stance that you’re “supposed to” or one of those heroes that can switch smoothly between both stances but well let’s ignore those people for now too and focus on the majority of people (who will be throwing a lead hook with their off hand.)
As we all know, learning new stuff with your off hand is hard. So it follows that the lead hook is going to be hard. Which is why so many people don’t invest much time in it, which is why people are bad at it, which is why we are focusing on it… so we can get less bad!
Yay for getting less bad at things. I think it helps to acknowledge why things are hard, plus it makes you feel even more awesome when you improve.
I Wanna Spar the Coach!
July 8th, 2024
All the kids want to spar the coaches in class. Why is that?
Well, I think it’s because we’re super fun but also because we have really good control. Add on to that the fact that we’re much bigger than them and if they slip up and wallop us, we can usually (some of the kids hit hard) take the shot without too much trouble.
With all that in mind, we sell it to the kids. Try to make it so everyone wants to spar YOU as much as they want to spar us. They get it. That means getting confident with your skills, having fun, and having great control… all three of which are incredibly awesome goals.
My Poor Little Attention Span
July 6th, 2024The last few weeks smushed together
In case you can’t handle absorbing things in larger than one second increments, here is a compilation video from the last few weeks at the gym, including one of our kid’s camps and all the usual excitement as well.
July BJJ Theme: Guard
July 5th, 2024
Guard. If you look around a BJJ floor at any given time during rolls, you’re likely to see about 50% of the pairs of players in some sort of guard.
Given the frequent occurrence of the position, it makes sense to focus on it. Heck, it wouldn’t be wrong to spend about 50% of your time on guard. There’s certainly plenty of stuff to cover: closed guard, open guard, half guard, passing the guard, sweeps, submissions, z-guard, k-guard, and all the guard variants I’ve never heard of or have forgotten.
If the theme works anything like our last few, everyone will come out at the end of the month a much more formidable player. My plan is to stick to closed guard and the fundamentals of the position. Hopefully the other coaches have some fancier stuff to keep everyone entertained.