First off, good luck on your first born Scott. Second, I want to share something I noticed in my development in ROSS. I am sure a lot of people already know this, but I am still amazed by it. It is when you finally learn to relax and become calm in your training. Not only do you see a lot more of what is going on and learn to take impact properly, but you notice what is going on with you. I noticed when you are in this relax state and do not have any excitement to motivate you, you need to really use your breathing to move. Because I really noticed how relaxed I became during hard-work, where it felt like I could fall asleep duirng it. Of course this is not good, because I would end up on my arse and in a bad position for grappling. Sometimes it felt like I was trying hard to fight my body to move from this relaxed state. Though some of it was do to the fact that I was being too nice with my partners and did not want to just truly go for it and possiable hurt them. But part of that is learning to trust your training partners and luckly I have great guys to work with. So when I did just go for it; not only did I dominate in hard-work, but I notice how breathing is the important driving force to keep it up. Also continuous, fast movement is another key factor you need to progress from soft-work to hard-work with. So once you reached that calm and relaxed state in a fight, I find that you can start accessing your true abilities and developed the speed and agility that is usely inhibited when your excited during a fight. I know that Scott has already stated this tons of times, but it is very eye opening to also see it yourself.
Matt
Matt, what can I say? Great post and great discovery.