Assessing your performance: Every day we training we need to assess our days performance so that we can make adjustments for tomorrow. The most natural and simple way to assess your own performance is in terms of result – did you win or lose the various matches you played in. That's fine and definitely the most important criteria. However, you must start going beyond this as you will have training partners of varying ability and attributes. For example, if you are going against much better people than yourself, you might want to judge your performance in terms of how long you lasted before being submitted, or perhaps in how long it took them to pass your guard. If you are going against people much lesser than yourself, you might want to assess your performance in terms of how much or how little strength and effort it took you to apply your moves, or perhaps in terms of how effectively you were able to apply your worst moves. By making your self assessments much more broad ranging and sophisticated than just “did you win or lose today” you immediately start to get a much clearer sense of progress as time passes. Always remember that the fundamental feature of good training is PROGRESSION. Using a more subtle and diverse set of measures for sparring results get you thinking along all the right lines for forward progress. Here, Gordon Ryan is going with a much smaller training partner and so plays a very relaxed game and tries to see how much he can get done with as little use of strength and power as possible. There is much more to progress than winning and losing. Progress is your lifeblood on the mats – understand that it comes in different forms and measures and you will have a better read on whether you are going forward with your training or not.
