“They’re just kids,” Charles Xavier says to Erik, looking at X-Men: First Class’s young mutants, who have just witnessed a scene of brutal destruction.
“No, they were kids,” Erik replies. “Shaw has his army, we need ours.”
“We’ll have to train…” says Xavier, who will soon be known as Professor X.
We had a great Combat Gold class on Friday night, working on building our army for the upcoming 2011-2012 tournament season leading up to 2012’s big event: The World Championships. This week, we drilled south side switches for about two hours, and then headed to the movies together to see X-Men: First Class.
Rather than sitting at home on the couch, Third Law’s advanced students put in a good two hours of drilling after the 7 p.m. grappling class ended. This week we had Master Roberto Torralbas, Coaches Joey Ruggiero and Joe Formica and Combat Gold members Mikhail Dye, Crystal Bradley and Katy Torralbas.
Master Roberto explains the south side switch, a guard passing technique, before the advanced class students work on drilling the move as much as possible to build muscle memory.
Our goal with any new move is to drill it so much that it becomes muscle memory, so that when we’re grappling and the opportunity to do the move presents itself we just react without thinking. Recently in Combat Gold we’ve been drilling spider guard passing and the south side switch, both essential guard passing techniques.
Combat Gold drills the south side switch, with the immediate goal of 1,000 reps. Ultimately, mastery requires 10,000.
On this night, each of the students got in a bunch of reps, working hard until about 10 p.m. Our immediate goal is to hit 1,000 reps per technique. Ultimately, we’ll need 10,000 to achieve mastery.
Then, it was time for a little team relaxation and assigned movie watching — At the recommendation of Master Julius Park from Crazy 88, we all headed to the theater to see X-Men: First Class.
Master Roberto, Katy and Crystal in the foreground, Joe and Joey in the background. And that's Mikhail on the far left... all you can see is his pretzel.
