Why the gi gasses you out, and it is mostly the grip

The second time I sparred I controlled most of the round and still ran out of air like it was my first day on the mat. It happened faster than wrestling ever drained me, and wrestling could drain me. The obvious suspect is the heat, because the gi is hot and I was soaked through. I think the heat has an alibi.

The first choke is the one your hands put on themselves

Wrestling never gave me cloth to hold. In the gi I take a fistful of collar or sleeve and squeeze, and a hard grip held for any length of time is an isometric clamp that shuts off its own blood supply. The forearm fills, stops getting what it needs, and quits. It is, in a small way, the first choke I learned in the gi, and I am the one who put it on myself. Studies of judo competition find that handgrip strength falls sharply across a hard day of matches, and the athletes name the forearm as the first place to fatigue. When my hands start to go, I clench everything else to cover for them, and clenching is the moment I stop breathing. That is the gas, and it begins at the hands.

The heat looks guilty and is mostly innocent

The sweat makes the heat feel like the cause. When someone actually measured it, though, rolling in the gi and rolling without it did not differ in any way that mattered for core temperature, sweat rate, or heart rate. The heat is real discomfort and the soaked gi is real weight, but neither one is what empties me. I blame the heat because I can feel it on my skin. The grip is quieter, and the grip is doing the work.

What wrestling gave me, and the one thing it did not

Six years on a wrestling mat built a base and a high tolerance for being uncomfortable, and both of those carry over intact. What they did not build was any endurance for holding fabric, because there was never any fabric to hold. That part is genuinely new, and the encouraging thing is that it is specific and it responds to training. Grapplers develop a handgrip endurance that untrained people do not have, which means the repair is mostly rounds in the gi, not a new program in the gym. The hands that died in round two are the same hands that will hold by the eleventh.

What I am trying instead of squeezing

Grip only when the grip is doing something, and open my hands when it is not. Stay loose until the instant I need to be tight. My professor tells me to breathe through my nose and to rest when I am the one in control, and after a few rounds those two cues sound like a single instruction: stop working harder than the position is asking. The breathing is its own skill that I am still learning, and the panic that rides on top of all of it, the part where my body decides the room is an emergency, has its own explanation too. This post is only about the hands, because the hands are where mine begins.

A wrestler does not gas in the gi because he went soft. He gasses because no one ever asked his hands to hold on this hard, and now, every round, something does.