ADCC Prep Week 5: The Home Stretch
ADCC Prep Week 5: The Home Stretch
B-Team ADCC athlete Chirs Wojcik writes about the closing weeks before the biggest grappling opportunity of his life, the 2024 ADCC World Championships.
We’re almost there.
I found out I was competing at ADCC in early June, and since then it’s been a long haul to get this close to the competition.
This article will come out on one of the final days of July, and ADCC is going to be on August 17 and 18.
We’re less than 3 weeks away.
My flights are booked. My body is almost ready. Mentally, I’m focused and really just ready to get out there and let it fly.
Get Caught Up On Chris' ADCC Prep Blog
- I'm Competing at ADCC. Here's My Training Routine and Thoughts On The Event
- ADCC Prep Week 2: The Grim Reality of Trying to Be Your Best
- ADCC Prep Week 3: The Mental Game of Grappling
- ADCC Prep Week 4: "The Deload Week"
Today, we’re talking about some of my final preparations going into the last few weeks of camp.
If you aren’t almost ready by now, you won’t get ready.
One of John Danaher’s Instagram posts one time was essentially about how your competition performance is more reflective of what you’ve done for the last six to 12 months as opposed to the last six to 12 weeks.
It’s important to remember this when we think about what the purpose of a performance training camp is.
The “training camp” is more about fitness than skills.
Our camp has been primarily focused on building up our ability to perform. This means that we’ve had a high volume of training at varying intensities; we’re not reinventing anyone’s game, and we’re not learning a ton of new skills. I’m learning little things here and there (Dima has showed some really good passing details and wrestling strategy that I’ve been working on), but I’m mostly just trying to get ready to compete.
The skill development phase of training is supposed to have already happened.
This doesn’t mean that we aren’t learning (I feel like with the right mindset you can learn some stuff every day), but it does mean that the main goal for the last few months of training has been to get ready to peak in August.
If you haven’t been working on improving your skills over the last year, you aren’t going to be able to do it now to the level where you’ll be able to recall those skills under pressure in August. Like a kid who didn’t study for his math test, you’ll be cramming while the other kids in class are sleeping easily and doing the math second nature.
This is true for all of the ADCC camp, but it’s especially important idea for the home stretch.
With that, here’s what I’m working on in the final weeks of the camp.
There are 3 main things that I’m focused on right now.
The first thing that I’m trying to focus on is tightness.
Smoother transitions, tighter control in things like takedowns, passes, and back takes, and a better ability to mix the different aspects of my game. When I watch guys who have had success at ADCC and the Trials – people like Jozef Chen, the Tackett brothers, or Nicky Ryan, one thing that they do really well is chain their jiu-jitsu together.
Their guard works with their wrestling which works with their passing, and vice versa.
This idea of Jiu-Jitsu is what I strive for every day in training.
The second main thing is pacing and endurance.
About three to four days per week, we’re doing long rounds. They’re usually 15-minute rounds but yesterday we did one 30-minute round. For most gyms (even us, where we do 10 minutes every day), this is really long. At ADCC, this is just a match plus overtime.
So basically, what I’m working on is being physically ready for a long match, having the ability to pace myself and not gas out in the first five to 10 minutes, and then being ready to wrestle the second overtime starts.
The final thing that I’m working on is my mindset.
ADCC is a really big tournament. It’s an Olympic year both in jiu-jitsu and the regular world.
For us in submission grappling, ADCC is the most prestigious title you can win. A good performance at ADCC can change your life.
That idea can also force you to put a bit of pressure on yourself, and I think that I definitely did that in the early weeks of the camp. I was training really hard, working against my body instead of with it, and dealing with a bit of anxiety about the competition.
For some reason, the other day, it hit me:
I’ve done hundreds of grappling tournaments in my life. Yes, ADCC is going to be the biggest one and there’s going to be a lot more people watching than normal, but is it really that different?
It is, but it doesn’t really help to think it is. It needs to be normal.
I am trying to be spending more time being excited and grateful than worried. Only 16 guys my size in the world get to have this opportunity. That’s kind of cool if you ask me.
A happy fighter is a dangerous fighter, so that’s what I’m trying to be at ADCC.
Closing Thoughts
Last week, I was visiting family and friends doing seminars in Chicago.
Normally, I can be a bit nomadic. I’ve found that shocking my routine is one of the best ways to learn new skills in jiu-jitsu. People in California train differently than people in the Midwest and the East Coast.
I would do a competition in one city, a seminar in another, a few days of training in yet another, and then back to my home base in Austin for a few weeks.
But this time is different. We’re not really worried about building skills right now, we’re focused on performance.
I got back at the end of last week and I won’t be traveling again until I head to Vegas. The next few weeks are about dialing everything in on and off the mat and getting back into my routine.
I’m trying my best to do everything right over these next few weeks:
- Highly structured training
- Focused rounds
- Strength and conditioning focused on performance, not “what I think I normally do”
- A good diet
- A good sleep schedule
- A low-stress lifestyle
- Recovery activities (hot tub, sauna, etc)
Sometimes, life gets in the way and makes these things harder to keep in your routine, but they are essential for performance. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.
We’re on the home stretch. I want to finish strong.
Read more from Chris at TheGrapplersDiary.Substack.com
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