I have too many goals at the moment. Maybe one of them should be to have fewer goals.

Here’s the grand list:

– Improve my conditioning, endurance and strength. – Focus on generating momentum from my core and using my entire body in unison. – Train transitions instead of just static positions. – Train combinations instead of isolated techniques. – Be fully committed to my movements, transitions and techniques. – Drill the crazy scrambles until I can come out on top (literally or figuratively). – Work on my takedowns and wrestling skills. – Get a mean armdrag from standing, even left-handed. – Use the duck under and Russian 2-on-1 in combination with the armdrag. – Fight to come to my knees and stand up more, especially from under side control. – Make wrestling sit-outs instinctual. – Acquire better base and balance, especially while passing. – Develop supernaturally heavy hips for passing guard. – Build an aggressive guard passing game from standing and knees. – Improve my standing guard breaks from good posture and safety position (AKA stalling posture). – Make the Margarida my money pass. – Fight for underhooks more from everywhere. – Finally get a decent underhook-take-the-back half guard game. – Also work on the out-the-back-door deep half guard. – Refine my core game as I continue to expand it by incorporating new strategies, positions and techniques. – Revisit things I thought didn’t suit me before and see if they do now. – Spot bad habits and eliminate them. – Be aggressive. – Compete in the next Pan Ams.

I could think of a few more, and I’m always coming up with more, but that’s always true. So many spinning plates to keep up.

That’s awful lot of goals. There’s no way of working on them all at once without losing direction. Part of handling that will be consolidating them and seeing which ones fall under the same theme so I can address them collectively.

But I think another part of the solution is to pick certain goals and give myself an assignment to work on them for a certain amount of time. This is to keep me on track, focused on a limited number of goals, so I can progress through each of them in an orderly way rather than jumping around and never devoting enough time and energy to any single one.

From the next two months, for better or worse, I will work on:

– Traditional and deep half guard with the underhook. – Standing passes and the Margarida in particular.

How I’ll do it:

– Drill these any chance I have, such as at open mat and before and after class. – Do progressive resistance isolation drilling/sparring of each. – Pull half guard all the time. Switch to half guard from my other guards. – Always stand to pass.

Setting these specific goals doesn’t preclude several of my other more general ones, such as getting the underhook more, always trying to come on top, staying aggressive, etc. These broad goals apply to the specific ones.