I don’t want anyone reading that headline to assume I ever thought martial arts training was a joke. It’s just, last week, I got to experience it for myself.
Before I wrote last week's feature on the Cross Guard Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition team, owner/head instructor Sam Kimmel encouraged me to try a few group training sessions.
I’m not quite where I used to be physically. I embraced the natural dad-bod before Seth Rogen made it mainstream. But I was immediately interested.
I ended up training for three days.
Here’s where I learned one of Kimmel’s favorite philosophies: if you can nail your technique when you’re tired, you can succeed when it counts.
There were six to 10 of us each day in the school, a tiny room in the front of the NAPA Auto Parts store on Collins Street Kimmel uses every inch of.
From 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., the air conditioning was turned off, the reggae music was turned up and we were doing cardio workouts until our legs begged for mercy.
It was the circle of death: dozens of sprawl jumps. One hundred burpees. Five hundred reps of crunches, light push-ups, leg exercises and skydivers. Then more sprawl jumps added in for good measure. Medicine-ball squats, rope work, jump-rope endurance, switch kicks (mimics running in place, but slightly more dangerous to anyone in front of you), and, did I mention sprawl jumps? It all adds up.
This only lasts about 30 minutes, which is what everyone from doctors to my dad recommend for anyone’s daily cardio routine, but it was easily the most intense cardio I’ve ever done.
I wanted to pat myself on the back for not throwing up on the first day, but that might have caused me to throw up.
At the halfway mark of each day, we all got on the ground for the grappling lessons. Kimmel is one of those instructors who does the workouts with you, so he’s feeling the burn, yet his technique is excellent.
As I expected, most of my classmates had a pretty good handle on the techniques. Each hold took some time to learn but, in the end, I got the hang of most of them.
The last 15 minutes of each day were devoted to rolling, where we each partnered up and grappled until someone tapped out. While I spent most of my rolling time getting locked into armbars (I relied too much on takedown moves), there were times when things clicked.
I’m pleased to say that, even though I couldn’t nail every cardio workout and my left arm got trapped in more submission holds than I’d like to admit, I did the classes with no training wheels and lived to write about it.
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.