Weighing In

This post has nothing to do with actually weighing in, but rather (at least, as I start it) what you do with your weight.  More specifically, what I do with my weight.

I am a bit over 6'1" tall, and walk around at about 180 pounds.  Back in 2006, before making my diet environmentally conscious and training jiu jitsu, I was a bit north of 200.  Never overweight or anything, but now I'm just skinny.  In the last two weeks, I've told a few people I train with what my weight is and they're all surprised it's so high.  They were convinced that I actually weighed more like 160 or 165.  Klint, my instructor, is one of those people.  Now to be fair, some days I get home from training and I'm more like 175 on the scale at home, but I've never been much lower than that.  At least, not since high school or college.  So this evening, these observations and shocked reactions got me thinking about how I use my weight when I'm on the mats.

To start with, I'm not really that strong.  I never really added any athletic muscle onto my frame.  Ever.  I have always been lanky and lean, and m legs are strong and flexible.  I'm a dude, so I have a little meathead strength hidden in my DNA, but really, I try to keep my jiu jitsu game about movement and baiting-and-switching rather than pinning and crushing.  At the same time, I know that a lot of my game would probably improve if I were to start putting some thought into how I was using my weight.  In my guard passes, for sure.

This hasn't gone anywhere, really.  I guess I want to sort out why it seems to me like I'm not using my weight effectively.  If several of my training partners think that I am not as heavy as I in fact am, I take it to mean that I'm not efficiently using my weight to its full potential.  6'1", 180 lbs isn't small by any means.  Now I just need to sort how to use it without losing the sensitivity I've been building.