One of my favorite things in the gym that we used to do and that we just started doing again is when we have "Pro Training."  Pro training is a training session made up of intensive rounds, with few, if any breaks.  Points usually factor in somehow as well as a particular position, either a bad position or a specific one to start from.

Our Pro Training is done on Sundays in conjunction with our sister academy, Black Hole Jiu-Jitsu.  One Sunday their guys will drive up to our place to train and on the next Sunday our guys drive down to their place to train.  It started back up last week when a bunch of my teammates drove down to Black Hole and continued this week when they drove up to our gym.  Hopefully this will be continuing for the next couple months. 

I missed last weeks session unfortunately because I had a family reunion to go to, but this week I had no excuse since they drove to us.  Mike showed up with around 12 people, which was a pretty good sized group, while we had around roughly the same turnout.

Todays work was NoGi and the training format this time around consisted of two 5 minute rounds of drilling whatever technique you and your partner wanted.  From there we were broken up into two groups, the MMA guys went off to the cage for striking work while the Jiu-jitsu guys went to the mats on other side.  Once we were separated based upon discipline, the bjj guys were further subdivided into groups of three and we played a points game.  One man was down 2 points to start and had to come from behind to win while the other guy had to defend and add to their lead.  We did this for about 40 minutes nonstop with no time limit.  After this we jumped right into 5 minute rolls with a minute in between to find a partner. I think I had about five different partners during this drill.  I was exhausted by the time we were finished and it's probably safe to say we all were.

This sort of thing is good for everybody involved.  It's why I try to travel to NYC to get training in which barely happened this year and I knew it wouldn't because of my home projects.  And it's also why I try to find a place to train when I'm on holiday.   When you roll with the same people all the time, they know your whole game plan which can be frustrating.  It's good to have some new bodies to try out the game on that you have been crafting.