A Long Time

Covid hit my Jiu-Jitsu world in mid-March of 2020.

We were in California, and things got bad all over. Businesses of every type were shutting down. A lot of people were getting sick.

We headed north before the month was out. The freeways were strangely empty. Went through LA, San Francisco, and Seattle at what should have been rush hour, but wasn’t.

It was good to get home to Canada. Helen and I settled in for the long haul.

My Jiu-Jitsu shut down, along with pretty much everything else.

Gracie University is well known for the programs they put online, and they moved to take up the slack. They produced a few webinars, and were soon doing zoom lessons.

I loved the webinars, but their zooms didn’t click with me. A friend of mine in North Vancouver started doing zoom lessons of his own several times a week. These became my regular online program. Real, physical classes shut down everywhere.

We didn’t see any people in any way other than on screens, or masked and at a distance in a food store.

By July I found a partner for Jiu-Jitsu who is even more Covid careful than I am, and we worked for a few weeks until his situation changed and we had to end our meetings.

Helen found a few music groups that met masked, and only outdoors, and at several times the distance people were advised to maintain.

I had my zooms from North Vancouver, and nothing else Jiu-Jitsu related. They were great, and I was happy to get them, but something was lacking.

July became August, and then September. Nothing changed, but there was a shift by October.

A young gentleman and I started meeting to train. He was doing all of his high school classes at home, and was at least as deep into isolation as I am.

We trained three times a week. There were holes in this schedule on occasion. Although I am a retired man of leisure, my partner was still working his way through online high school, and also working online towards Royal Conservatory professional-level violin and viola exams.

On through Winter, and into Spring, and into the start of Summer. In April we received our first vaccination shots.

Then, on July 1st, our provincial government changed a lot of the official restrictions. Things started to open up, and Helen and I got our second Covid shots.

The local school won’t be in real operation for classes until September at the earliest, but small groups popped up.

I still work about 3 times a week with my musical friend. To this has been added twice a week with a small group of other folks, and an even smaller group of our most experienced people on Fridays. Soon I might even add a weekly trip to train with the fully open school in North Vancouver.

Suddenly, I’m training more than I would normally have done before Covid reared its ugly head.

Of course, this could all change in a flash if something goes sour; Covid variants spring to mind. However, I’m having a lot of fun.

My sister is coming for a visit soon, and we plan on going to see more family in Victoria in August.

Things are potentially more “normal” than they’ve been in a very long time.

Rule Changes

I live in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Things have been under Covid-19 restrictions for a very long time, but that is starting to change. The government recently announced the plan going forward regarding restrictions. Of course, it is quite possible that changes will happen, depending on how infection numbers run.

In my own case, the most important changes are those that pertain to Jiu-Jitsu training.

As of May 25th, indoor low-intensity training was permitted with limited attendance. For Jiu-Jitsu this meant no rolling, or anything like it. It isn’t clear what was meant by “limited” numbers involved, but it seems to be a recommendation to keep things small.

On June 15th, low-intensity workouts will ramp up to high-intensity, and limited numbers of participants will change to reduced capacity. July 1st will see attendance going up to full capacity. On September it all goes to fully normal, including allowing spectators.

This doesn’t mean that it will actually happen that way. Covid is unpredictable, as is human behavior surrounding it. If the number of infections spikes again the timetable will go all cattywumpus again.

What does loosening of restrictions mean for my own training?

Perhaps the local school will open up again. That would be a positive development, and I might even start attending.

I might even start going into the city again to train once in a while. That has complications of its own. It would require a partner. Would I want somebody from Vancouver, with an increase in the possibility of infection, or take a partner with me from around here? There is no perfect answer. I’d be shy to use my old public transportation method. Likely I’d go by car, although the price would increase greatly due to ferry costs.

It might only mean that my personal bubble doesn’t grow as big as either the local-school, or Vancouver-school options would necessitate. Perhaps I’ll end up in a group of 3 or 4 advanced students from around here. That is also an expanding of bubbles, but far less than attendance at even a small class would cause.

Perhaps I won’t participate in any of these options, at least for the immediate future. Perhaps increased activity in a solo fashion would be the way to go for now. I’d love to be running, especially with Summer-type weather starting up, but one of my ankles hasn’t been cooperating. It has had a good long, uninterrupted period of recovery. Maybe it’s time to try it out with a short run.

If that works out, followed by a gradual increase in distance, I might just stop feeling like a slug. That might make me less interested in getting back on the mat to roll around.

A delay could be a good thing. My first Covid vaccination shot was about a month ago, and maybe a bit of a delay would see me receiving my second dose before my training increases. That would significantly reduce the danger in any option I choose.

Teacher Focus

 

My last blog entry was all about getting the maximum learning out of every hour as a student of Jiu-Jitsu. This time will examine the role of the instructor in learning.

Let’s keep it simple, and assume that your school has asked you to take over teaching one class a couple of times a week, but maybe it’s only a single class on a particular day. Your job is the same.

It is your role and responsibility to do everything possible to maximize the learning that occurs.

Step one; Prepare what you are going to cover.

It need not be a formal lesson plan, but you should know where you are starting and where you are aiming for. This should be done ahead of time so that you can really think about it.

Step two; Get to the venue early.

This will give you a chance to greet students as they arrive. Doing this will help make them feel welcome, and might perhaps settle any nerves they may be having. This is especially true for new students.

Step three; Start on time.

How can you expect the students to be there on time if the class doesn’t start when it is supposed to? I’ve been to classes that started significantly late for no apparent reason, and that finished precisely on time. This meant the students were shorted on what they are expecting.

I’ve also been a student in a class that started very late where the instructor made up for it by going well past the finish time. This once left me stranded in the city unable to catch the last ferry home. I slept in my car simply because the instructor chose to neither begin nor end on time.

Step four; This is the one area that everybody thinks denotes a great instructor. The teacher explains the actual technique, and demonstrates it.

In Jiu-Jitsu this usually means about five-minute chunks of information sprinkled throughout an hour.

Do not try and give your students everything you know in one vast vomit of information. They will not retain it, and you will bore them to death. Give them just enough to do the first small sub-section and then get them working on it in pairs.

Step five; Properly handle the students’ practice time.

This is when students work on the material for around five minutes blocks of time.

I can’t tell you how many lessons I’ve attended where the instructor seemed to think that this was their break time. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you’ve just taught several classes in a row, you might need to relax a little, but be aware that you are taking any break time from your students.

The best practice-time teaching I’ve ever seen has been by Rener Gracie, and even he can’t always pull it off. At his best, he circulates from group to group throughout the entire practice period.

He stops and watches with stoney-faced intensity. This gets even the least motivated students moving, and trying to do their best. If the pair is doing fine, he moves to the next. Maybe he helps if they need it, and then moves on again. He doesn’t try and intervene if he doesn’t need to.

This means that when he calls the whole group back under his control he has not only been helping people, and motivated others to work harder, but he also has an excellent idea as to how well the group has actually internalized the material so far. Does he modify, or clarify, or continue on with the next step of instruction and demonstration?

Conversely, the worst teacher I’ve ever seen earned that rating from me by how he handled the practice part of a class he was running.

He did the “teaching” portion perfectly well, but when he had his people start working on it, he walked to the side and talked with some friends on the side. He not only didn’t circulate amongst the students, he didn’t even glance at them.

During his next teaching part he pushed on, and actually lied to the class saying that he had seen some of them making mistakes that he then proceeded to teach corrections for. I was there watching from the bleachers, and nobody in the group was making the mistakes that he claimed that he saw.

Hard to trust a teacher that lies to his students, and doesn’t care at all if they are learning. During his one-hour class, he dedicated about half to chatting with friends.

Step six; Evaluate how things are going, and modify if appropriate.

Typically, the first part of the material covered in the night is the most familiar to the students, and also the most vital to the later segments. If something is wrong it may be better to re-teach things from another perspective.

It is normally better if the students go home after the class understanding the first slice of material really well, than to be confused and discouraged about failing to learn the five items you had planned to cover, and pushed through. It is never as clear cut as this, and is always a judgement call.

Step seven; Supervise the post-class sparring time.

This is not a break time for the instructor. They are not finished yet. They need to be paying attention to the various rolling pairs of students looking out for potential danger. Likely there will be nothing of concern, but it is the role of the instructor to be the watchdog. When all is going well they get the fun of being able to watch the students also having fun.

Step eight; The wrap up.

This is when the instructor stops the last students from rolling and declares the session over.

Now, perhaps the instructor can mentally punch the clock and head home.

Summary;

Let’s say you are teaching a single, one-hour class that has a 30 minute rolling time afterwards. By following my recommendations you were probably there 15-30 minutes early, and left with the last students maybe 10 minutes after the end of sparring time. That means a commitment of a couple of hours, or maybe a little longer.

For those two hours the teacher needed to be in operation for all of it. There are no coffee breaks. The students deserve two hours of teaching, and observing, and motivating, and correcting, and praising, and supervising.

If you can’t do two hours there is a simple answer. Don’t accept the roll of instructor.

Of course, none of this is written in stone. Let’s say you aren’t teaching a single isolated session, but a block of three classes in a row. You may have to take some break time in there someplace.

Maybe it would be impossible for you to get to class with time to spare. Can you get somebody else to open up and act as greeter? No shame there.

There are always modifications to be made.

Focus In

 

In every activity, there are those who struggle with their progress. Often, they get discouraged and eventually leave the pursuit.

Conversely, there are a few very simple attitudes and tricks that can improve any serious student’s satisfaction with how things are going.

In this article, a Jiu-Jitsu example will be given as that is my most recent major-learning activity.

First, let me describe how I perform in Jiu-Jitsu. Generally, I know how to perform the skills required better than most of my peer group. I am able to roll on a competitive basis with others much more physically gifted than myself, and who are almost always only a fraction of my age.

I am only able to do this because I am effective at learning what is being taught.

Everybody seems to understand that training more will make you better. Three classes each week would be better than two, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

We all have lives to fit our learning into, and class schedules that sometimes conflict. Let’s assume that you are able to make it to three classes per week.

Most Jiu-Jitsu classes tend to have two parts to them. The first is what I consider the instructional and practice part, and after that comes free-sparring. Almost universally, the instruction and practice component runs for about an hour.

In that hour, the instructor will explain and demonstrate chunks of material and then the students pair up to work on it. Very typically, there will be about 5 bits of instruction, and 5 periods of practice. This will vary, but most of the instructional parts will last in the neighbourhood of 5 minutes, as will each of the practice components.

So you are at a class, and the instructor calls everybody over. They then explain the first part, and demonstrate it several times, giving tips and explaining pitfalls.

How can you maximize this?

It will be short in duration; about 5 minutes or so. Give the instructor and the lesson every bit of your attention and focus. Fight to keep your mind from wandering. A trick to facilitating this is to not let your physical gaze drift from the instructor.

If you drift, give your brain a smack and refocus. It’s only 5 minutes long; you can do it. Even if you have serious problems with this kind of concentration, do the very best that you are able.

A bonus trick is to refrain from asking a question unless it directly relates to performing the technique as demonstrated.

So now you move into practice with a partner. You have 5 minutes to drill what you have been shown. If you failed to focus during the lesson period, you will already be at a disadvantage. Either way, you need to get right to work on what you were shown.

Don’t engage in small talk, or even in Jiu-Jitsu talk that isn’t about exactly what you need to get going with. Treat your drill time with the same kind of focus that you aimed at the lesson.

Either you or your partner will go first, and then it is the other person’s turn. The order doesn’t matter, but after each repetition, get your pair immediately going on the next repetition.

You don’t have to move fast or anything like that. You just need to perform the movements at an appropriate learning pace, then quickly change roles and keep going; over and over.

With five minutes of time, you should each be able to easily get 5 repetitions done. A bonus tip is that if you focus fully when it is your partner’s turn, you will get almost as much benefit out of that as you do out of your own. You’ll also get used to what if feels like when somebody pulls this particular move on you.

You would be surprised at how slowly some pairs go through their drills. Lots of chit chat, and unrelated discussion.

There also seems to be another common type of training. Many people work well, and with focus, but as soon as they think they’ve gotten the move right, they stop and just sit. They typically have to do the drill about 3 times before they are happy and stop.

That means that in their five minutes they have actually practiced the move correctly exactly once. If your pair took just as long to get it right, and then kept going and completed 5 repetitions per person, you have practiced it correctly several times more than the team content to stop after getting it once.

Then the instructor calls you all back for the next part of the lesson and demonstration. Now you get to rest for a bit if the drill was at all strenuous, and again need to give the instructor all of your attention.

So the class ends, and you stayed focused the best that you could through all of the time that the instructor was teaching, and got maximum value out of your practice time. Let’s say that you have scored 100% on pulling maximum value out of the hour. If you’d let your mind wander during teacher time, and you drifted during 1/10 of it, your hour-value score would have dropped down to 95%.

If you allowed yourself to be a 3-repetition drill practiser, then your 95% grade would slip clear down to below 85%.

Still good, you say?

Now it’s time to roll. You grab somebody who by chance started training on the same day as you, is physically almost identical to you, and off you go. You have even attended all the exact same classes over the last few years. The only difference is that you train at 85% efficiency, while he works at 100% of what he can do.

He’s 15% better than you.

You manage to shoot in an 85% triangle, which he defends with a 100% counter, gets into side mount, and tries a 100% elbow-cup-armbar, which you try and counter at 85%. Can you see where this will end up?

You might not even know why this guy regularly out performs you.

The upside is that you only need to train this way for a hour at time, and only for a few times a week.

Sadly, I’m actually being over-generous regarding how little some people work during drill time. Being somewhat sidelined by Covid, I “attend” a lot of zoom classes. Although valuable in their way, they are nothing like real classes.

One interesting side effect is that I get to spy on people when the instructor has live-class members go off to drill. Some use every moment, but many don’t do much at all. Some immediately go into play mode without doing the actual technique they were just shown at all.

Can’t live without play? After the regular class there is always about a half-hour more available mat time. This is pretty open. Some folks drill or experiment, but most roll.

These rolls can be fast and intense, or mellow and flowing. This is the play built into Jiu-Jitsu.

Is it so very hard maintaining the best focus and work habits that you can during class? I could see how it might be if it were part of a long, drawn-out type of school day. What I am asking is quite an intense brain workout, but it isn’t a day-long activity.

The classes are short and sweet, and chock-full of learning opportunities.

Danger of Sleep

 

One of my main physical activities is running.

I first got involved in it while still living in Fort Saint John at the end of the 1980s.

This continued when we moved to a small town on the west coast of Canada, and I've been at it ever since. That adds up to about thirty-years' worth.

There have been a few bumps over the years that forced temporary stoppages, but recently it's been the worst.

I've had a cranky knee since the middle of 2014. It usually behaves, and often I can't tell my bad knee from the good one. On occasion, it gives me a bit of a twinge, and I take a couple of weeks off to settle things back down.

The most recent twinge popped up for no reason at all just before Christmas a little over a year ago. I had gone to bed absolutely dandy, and awoke with my knee singing me a tale of woe.

If that happened on a normal day I would have shut down anything that could have aggravated the situation. The problem on that day was that I was scheduled to get myself into the big city to test for a Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Brown Belt. I pushed on.

By the end of my evaluation, my knee was definitely done, and I limped off to catch the first of several buses required to get me to the ferry home.

I was off of running until March. We were in Palm Springs by then, and I did a respectable number of delightful desert runs. The month after that we were back home, and I did about a half dozen neighbourhood runs.

My knee then decided to go bad again. It earned itself another good, long healing period, and then I started with a self-designed rehab program.

I ran every day, but my first runs were only a couple of hundred meters in length. Every 8 days I'd bump it up by a hair. Everything went very well, and I stuck to my slow-buildup system.

 

Every 8 days the distance would go up by half a mile. Once I'd finished my 8 days doing 3 miles I declared myself officially fixed. This had taken 48 days in all.

Daily runs continued, with distances in the 5-8km range, as the mood took me. After a few months, I stopped worrying about my leg at all.

So then, of course, a sleep injury to my ankle shut me down again. I made a few attempts to keep going, but it was clear that damage was being done, and so prudence called another complete halt.

While healing from that, another unrelated sleep injury prolonged the downtime. This time it was to the hip on the side which had been fine all along.

Altogether the running halt was three months or perhaps a bit more.

Yesterday, I did the first part of my latest slow-increase rehab. The distance was a hearty half of a mile, after which I sat about waiting for some bloody body part to announce its lack of cooperation. None did.

Therefore, I was out doing another half mile today, and will hopefully keep this up until 8 days have passed. Then the distance will grow up to a full mile, and keep growing over time.

The injury list went knee, knee, ankle, hip; all with no cause other than sleeping funny. This doesn't happen to young people.

 

Shots

 

Covid landed on the world like a bomb late last year. The first cases were in China. It started arriving around the rest of the world early in the new year, and the USA had its first death early in February.

Canada has since lost over 11,000 lives; the USA just under a quarter of a million, and the entire world has lost 1.33 million.

This all took significantly less than a year to happen.

What do those numbers mean?

Let's take the US figures, and imagine an absolutely average small city of 100,000 people. That group would have had 3,366 known to have been infected with Covid-19, and out of those infected 75 would have died.

Now imagine the USA divided into 3,282 such groupings. That is how many people live in that country. In each 100,000 person group there would have been another 3,366 infected and another 75 dead.

In my own country of Canada the numbers are somewhat better, but still very grim. Each 100,000 person block of Canadians has had 29 deaths.

That's why the world has reacted as it has.

This is why my own little life has had to change.

I wear a mask in the grocery store and we haven't seen any member of our family since this thing started.

Normally, Helen is off at some kind of music get-together almost every day. This has stopped. Normally, I am off doing Jiu-Jitsu almost daily. This has also stopped.

Normally, we travel a lot; almost 1/3 of the time we are away. Covid actually exploded while we were off on a holiday. This was cut short, and we headed home. A big trip to Europe arranged for autumn was canceled, and there were no short trips to go see friends and family. We have never missed a Christmas with family in Victoria but will be staying home this year.

This hasn't really been a hardship, but it all is a major change. We are happy Covid hasn't had any greater direct impact on us. Nobody in our family has gotten sick.

There have been pandemics in the past. Spanish flu jumps to mind. It was a weird one, seeming to spring from nowhere, and then it vanished again all on its own.

Other diseases stuck around and were just part of the landscape, such as polio and smallpox. Whatever happened to them?

Silly me; how could I forget? What happened to those killers was the introduction of vaccines. As a kid in the 1960s, I was one of many who received polio and smallpox vaccinations. Both diseases vanished from the western world, and by 1980 there was no smallpox left on the loose anywhere on the planet. It was systematically hunted down and wiped out.

That's why I was hoping that a vaccine would be possible for Covid-19. Not every disease can be attacked this way. Sometimes a vaccine can work, but that the protection is far from ideal, and requires frequent boosters.

Of course, anything along that line would be a good thing. Authorities were shooting for something that would be at least 50% effective and were very hopeful that 70% would not be unrealistic. In either case, a vaccine would be a useful tool, but not a pandemic-ender on its own. By comparison, the smallpox vaccine was 90% effective.

Now researchers are finishing the steps in the creation and testing of several Covid vaccines. After clinical trials, two seem almost ready to distribute and the effectiveness seems to be stunning.

One is around 90%, and the other is even higher than that. In each of these vaccine trials, 30,000 people received injections. Half received the vaccine, while the other half were given a placebo.

In the trial of one of these Covid-19 vaccines 90 people in the group of 15,000 who received placebos contracted Covid, 11 of the cases were serious. Of the 15,000 who got the actual vaccine, 5 contracted Covid, and none of the cases was serious. The other trial hasn't released the detailed figures.

Both vaccines will likely be starting distribution in late December or early January.

This is huge. Until now, there was no indication that there would ever be anything even close to an end for Covid. Now it is possible.

The first hurdles will all be about distribution. Many of the most promising vaccines have already been in production for some time. The bottleneck has been testing and government approval. 

One of these two vaccines is extremely difficult to transport and to store. It has to be kept at an extremely low temperature. The other is far better in this regard. There are also dozens of other vaccines hot on their heels.

There will be priority assigned to certain groups; health workers, care-home residents, and people with high-risk conditions. For a while, it will seem as if it is taking forever to be available for everyone, but then suddenly it will be everywhere in large quantities.

Then the saddest and most exasperating phenomenon will happen. A shocking number of people have stated that they will be in no hurry to get vaccinated, and many of these don't plan on getting the shots at all.

Vaccines have been getting a bad rap. There has been all that nonsense where they have been falsely linked to autism. People also fear the list of ingredients, or distrust drug companies so much that they are sure it's all a big conspiracy.

Let's put the importance of vaccines in an easy to understand form. Three of the biggest killers of the 20th century were the First World War (about 20 million dead), Spanish Flu (50 million dead), and the Second World War (about 80 million dead). Those three accounted for 150 million tragic deaths. In comparison, smallpox killed 300 million. That's twice as many. Imagine how many more would have died if nobody had been willing to be vaccinated against smallpox.

But let's look at the future instead of the past. What if Covid kills as many in 2021 as it has so far in 2020? With no end game in sight, let's say it keeps doing so for 20 years. That would mean the deaths of around 25 million people that could easily be avoided. That would put it somewhere in between the death tolls of World War One and the Spanish Flu.

I plan on getting vaccinated as soon as I can. This will likely require two shots several weeks apart. I'm good with that. It also isn't an issue if the immunity is short-lived. If yearly shots are needed I won't mind at all.

People talk about wanting things to get back to normal. It strikes me as a fine desire that we should all work towards. It won't come true just by wishing.

We should all wear our masks, and keep our distance. We should not have social gatherings, and when a vaccine becomes available we should all get our shots.

History of No Threat

 

I really don't understand why the American right is always so terrified at the prospect of having a Democrat for a president. The best that I can figure out is that they are scared Democrats are going to take away their guns and that they are all socialists.

I am pretty old, and the first president that I really became aware of was Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat.

He came to power after Kennedy was killed, and got elected one term after that. He never went after people's personal firearms and didn't do anything commie at all.

He had two big legacies. The right-wingers seemed to love his Viet Nam war but still hated the guy.

The other big thing he did was to powerfully push for civil rights. In case you don't remember his "Great Society," was aimed at rights for Blacks.

Then along came a Republican named Richard Nixon. He got elected twice, although he was forced to resign before his 8 years were up.

Ford was Vice-President when Nixon went down and became president for about 2.5 years. He lost the office to a Democrat named Jimmy Carter.

Strangely, Carter never got around to rounding up people's guns or making the USA socialist state.

He was followed by 2 terms of Reagan and one of George W. Bush; both Republicans.

Next came another scary Democrat, Bill Clinton. The right really, really seemed to hate that guy. Luckily, he only had 8 years in office, which I suppose meant he didn't have enough time to get started on his secret cunning play to strip the American people of their guns or to pull any socialist nonsense.

Then it was 8 more Republican years under a second George Bush.

Then another Democrat took over, and this one was a Black guy named Barak Obama.

He also had 8 years in office, and he left people's guns totally alone. He did try and create a plan whereby all Americans would get medical insurance. The Right seems to think this was the thin edge of the wedge of creeping communism. Really it was an attempt to arrange for all Americans to have access to medical care.

Then it was 4 long years of Mister Trump.

Just days ago, he lost the presidency to Joe Biden, another Democrat.

And what are the right-wingers whining about, other than the loss in general? They think Biden is after their guns and is a socialist.

So, to recap, there was Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and now Biden.

None of them have banned guns or set up a socialist state. In any other modern, industrialized state they would have been considered on the right-wing side of the spectrum, but in the USA they are evil lefties.