Last Jiu Jitsu session of the year on Thursday with Ian and the guys down at Sweat FA, Weston, and as is traditional for Ian's classes, we had a bit of a blow out avoiding techniques altogether, in favour of some competitive exercises.
We first did this thing where we made a large circle with a load of belts and two guys faced off in stand up. The object is to either throw your opponent out of the ring or take them down to the mat with a winner stay in format. However, you can't drop you own hand or knee to the mat to do so. A lot harder than it sounds. Most guys just opted for trying to get their opponents out of the ring turning the exercise into a sumo match of sorts. Very fun although Tommy Hill managed to pick up an unfortunate and painful looking leg injury. Hope Tommy gets better quickly.
The second game/exercise had two guys face each other, with both having a strip of plastic tucked in their belt at the back. The object here was to try to reach around and grab the opponents plastic strip without first giving up you own strip. This was another fun game with a fast pace.
The last game type exercise we did was from knee to knee. Two guys face off with the victor being the person who manages to manoeuvre their opponent out of the mat area or pin their opponent's back to the mat for 10 seconds. For this one there was a tiered tournament set up with Dan Foster eventually coming out victorious. I went out early in the first round when Big "Lil" Justin basically picked me up and threw me out of the mat area.
After all that we did some situational rolling, attacking or defending the rear mount and then went on to some normal rolling.
Special mention needs to go to Glenn Cutter who just picked up his purple belt from Ian at Chico's (Mendes) last grading. Massive congrats to him. Also well done to Justin for picking up his blue belt, great and well deserved achievement.
Well that session marks the end of a great year of training for me. Admittedly I still miss training with Marcus on Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes as we were really pushing each other forward but I managed to pick up a couple of other training partners, who, with a bit of hard training will really start to push my game forward.
For the new year in Bjj I really have to sit down and plan what I need to improve in my game and most of all I need to train and spar loads!! I think I'm going to look more into the whole drill to win phenomenon that seems to be catching fire at the moment and try to insert some of that into my training sessions. Up until now I've only really scratched the surface with it, using basic arm bar and triangle drills, but there seems to be so much more out there to help you improve your technical memory that it just can't be ignored.
Finally, I'd like to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I hope you all get everything you want and enjoy your festive season to the fullest. I'll be back in the new year, training and working off the extra Christmas weight that I will have put on.
Goodbye 2012 - You've been a good year. Here's hoping for better in 2013!!! ¬m/
Wow, I'm slipping with these log updates. It's now Tuesday 11th and I'm only just getting around to writing up on last Thursday's class. It's mostly a combination of working hard in the build up to Christmas, and of course the build up to Christmas itself. For those of you that don't know, I'm a mega Christmas nut. Love this time of year. Love the festivities. Love the buying of the presents. Love the decorating. I love taking my family out on Christmas related nights out. I'm a big fan of the whole season.
That and I like to drink and eat a decent amount over December. I'm fairly sure I'm way above the 13 st 2lb I was weighing in at a week and a half ago. I can't even count the amount of take-away food I've had since the Hereford Open on one hand. I'm trying to keep a handle on it though. I'm still only eating a healthy breakfast and a chicken salad for lunch so at least I ain't fatting up during the day. Night time is my weakness though. I seem to have this alter-ego called Fat Man. My will power dies once I get home and bask in the lights of my Christmas tree. A beer might come out and the take away menu draw is looming large in my direction. Ah well, I can't diet loads in the new year. I'll be skint enough!! ;o)
Anyway, on to the subject matter. Good numbers at Ian's class last Thursday. Most of the regulars turned up. A damn good sesh too.
Venue: Sweat FA, Weston Super Mare, Uk
Instructor: Ian Rossiter (Checkmat Black Belt)
Glenn Cutter took warm up, which is never fun. It's not like he does much different to what we usually do, it's just the length and intensity he drives us through it. You always feel a bit shagged after a Glenn warm up.
Techniques:
(For simplicity, I always explain techniques from the side and using the grips that I initially learned them)
The first technique was just a quick recap of Ian's favourite method of breaking closed guard. You're in the opponent's closed guard. Using you hands to push his hips down to the ground, drive your right knee into the guy's butt. Now open your left leg out wide to the side and a little behind so the guy can't get a good grab of it without having to move a lot (your left foot should be flat to the floor). From there you just sit back, leaving the knee forward. This should break open your opponent's guard although sometimes you might come up against a guy with a strong guard lock or a guy who just has freakishly long legs. In this case the judicious use of your left elbow on the guy's right inside leg is always a help.
This is an Old Skool Ian technique. Anyone who has trained with him for longer than a couple of months will have this technique ingrained in their DNA. And rightfully so as it's very high percentage as a method of breaking close guard. Ian's point with it on this occasion though was to show how you can counter the guard break.
For this particular demonstration it was countering into a triangle. When the guy is going for the positioning for the above guard break and is readying to sit back, you cross grab his collar with your right hand (grabbing his right collar), grab his right arm sleeve with your left to keep it close to you, open your guard and plant your left foot into his right hip, pushing your self back away from him a bit. Your grips will pull him toward you and give you the time and the space to bring your right leg up and inside of his left arm to pass it over his left shoulder across his back. Releasing the collar grip you had with your right hand, you can reach over his right shoulder to grab the leg that you've passed behind him. Pulling this into position you should be able to fold your left leg over the shin of the right to close the triangle tight. If the guy's a bit bigger or if you've got short legs, you may have to shift your hips out to the right a little to get enough of your right leg over his back to be able to close the hold on him.
Ian moved us on from there to one of my favourite techniques, the Flower Sweep. As I've done a lengthy write up on this move before I think I'll just link that HERE instead. Still love this move and use it all the time.
The next move we did was a variation of the Flower sweep that Chico showed us at his recent Weston seminar. I've also written this one up before but the log is quite long and I doubt anyone reading this will want to trawl through that so I'll just copy and paste it here.
"Next up was a sweep variation for if the guy traps your arm. He's in
your closed guard and baited you with the open left leg. You reach under
to take it but he's too quick and clamps his leg back down shut again,
trapping your right arm in there and cutting off one side of your upper
body defence. However this is not the end of the world. In fact after a
short while of drilling this move I felt this was an amazing turn of
events. All you need to do is ensure he can't move his right hand from
your waist at this point then you can sweep him over to your left (his
right) side. To do this you open your guard and drop the left foot to
the floor and can basically roll him over to his back using a flower
sweep style right leg up, kicking him (not proper kicking, it's just a
description) at the left under arm to flip him over and come up
comfortably in mount. I absolutely LOVE this sweep as a cool variation
on the Flower Sweep. I've already hit it a few times in rolling since.
Love it!!
You can even just slot your arm inside when he hasn't opened the leg. Works the same way. Amazing sweep."
Saves a lot of typing this does.
Rolling:
First roll of the night was against Rich Presley. It was a nice fast paced roll with lots of positional back and forth stuff. Lots of flow. I managed to get to half guard top on him at one point and choked him out with and Ezekial choke. Soon after in that round I dropped back in his open guard and hit an ankle lock.
Second roll was against Glenn'son, Ash. Ash is only a young kid (about 13 or 14) and a relative newcomer, so I don't like to pounce on him and try and tap him out in seconds. That's a chump move. Instead I had a nice flowing roll, showing him where he makes mistakes and trying to help him polish up his game. He does definitely seem to be getting better too. Could have a good competition future ahead of him if he dedicates himself. I bloody wish I'd got into Bjj at 14 I tell you.
Third roll was against the man himself, Glenn Cutter. Rolling against Glenn is always a fast and furious match up and I frequently feel like I'm on the defensive. Fortunately I feel quite comfortable playing guard and was able to fend off most of Glenn's pass attempts. I think he did pass at one point but I was able to regain guard fairly quickly. Which is much preferable to the other option of getting caught in Glenn's stifling North South :o( . When he was back in my guard though I noticed he had his left arm low so I was able to quickly pass my right leg over it and close off a nice triangle. Glenn tapped pretty quickly after that. Not much else happened in that round.
Last roll was against Tom Hill, who I have not been able to get anything on for quite a while now. It's always a hard tight roll going against Tom with not much transition at all. This was the same. Very much a lock horns and go through a physical chess like struggle, trying to find the grip, pull or push that will advance. Neither of us ended with the upper hand come the end of the round and that was the end of the lesson. I look forward to rolling with Tom some more soon. I hope he goes in for some comps this year too. For his weight class (<64kg)he's like a friggin pit bull. Once he gets hold of you he's bloody hard as fuck to shake off. I reckon he's got more medals in his future. He's already medalled in every comp he's been in.
So that's it for that week. I've been training with Luke Brown on the occasional lunchtime at the moment and he's learning at a wicked pace. I've pretty confident I can train him to do well in a comp come next year. He's already got freaky strength for his weight and as a personal trainer his athleticism is well above average too. Couple that with the quickness with which he picks up techniques and he could be doing well in some of the local tournaments next year.
Due to work commitments and a late night shopping promise I gave my wife, I am unable to pick up a class next week. Hopefully Luke'll put in some lunchtime sesh's to cheer me up.
I'll try and get a log up here about something in the mean time. Get the old Bjj writing juices flowing again.
After a good training session on Thursday, 29th November down at Sweat FA, where my good buddy Rich Presley gave me 40 minutes of hard sparring, I felt a little bit more prepared than I had.
But to be honest it wasn't really enough. I have basically existed on a session a week of Jiu Jitsu for the last 3 or 4 weeks which doesn't come close to cutting the mustard when you're about to compete against guys who are training 3,4,5 times a week.
I was in pretty high spirits during the journey up. Chris Cook, a club mate from Weston's DV8 class was good enough to come up with me for support and company (and possibly to drive home should I have injured myself). We had a good laugh on the way up and I was fairly calm.
That changed when I got there though as my adrenaline level just went through the roof the moment I walked into Hereford Leisure Centre. We met up with some Checkmat club mates from Bristol in the hall. Shabba and Martin were in the stands and Josh and Rich were down at the mat waiting area getting ready for their second matches (yes we'd missed their first).
The Hereford Open is totally different to most other Bjj comps I've attended in that the day is fantastically and intricately planned out like a military operation with weigh in times and warm up times and even bracket start times actually happening exactly as written up on the schedule.
I've been to some events (cough* cough* Bristol Open) where you start warming up at the scheduled time and don't get on the mat for a full hour and a half after that.
So you can imagine my surprise to find that Josh and Rich had already had there first fights and were waiting on their second each, by the time we got there. And they were in the Adult Blue Belt <82.3Kg bracket just before mine!?
This straight away set me a bit more nervously on edge. Getting there and being faced with the knowledge that my bracket was next on mat 4. I watched Josh and Rich's matches and then quickly got changed to weigh in.
Time seem to fly by at this point and before I knew it I was down at the table being weighed in by event organiser Dave Coles. I came in about a kilo under the 88.3Kg max weight for my bracket, which was good as I hadn't exactly dieted as hard as I could.
This was where my first mistake occurred. At that point, still not realising how accurate the timings for this competition were, I went back to my seat in the bleachers and relaxed with the guys for a bit. What I should of been doing was warming up over in the warm up area but I thought (judging by past competitions) that I'd have ample warm up time once I'd reported in to the mat 4 judging table at my allotted time of about 12:20.
So when I reported in and started a quick stretching routine, I was a bit gob smacked to have a guy come up and call my name and tell me I was next up on the mat?! Fuck! To make matter worse, the first match went quick as one guy tapped the other guy out in quick fashion,
So I was up. At this point I will admit that I was unprepared and fairly nervous. So much so that when I approached the mat to be ushered forward by our ref, Pippa Granger, I was embarrassed by the fact that she had to ask me to take my wedding ring off (rookie error).
When I got on the mat I was facing off against a guy called Mark Thomas, who later told me he was from the home club (Hereford). He didn't look fazed or nervous at all and was pretty quick into a stand up grip battle and promptly took me down with a suicide trip/throw, holding on to my arm as I hit the ground. From there he quickly rolled over and locked on a reasonably tight arm bar. I turned my arm away from it at first while I moved my body around for an escape but he was fairly tenacious with his grip and turned over on it and yanked hard. A few more seconds of exploring to see if I could escape convinced me that if I held on my arm would probably be broken so I tapped.
At the end of the day, the guy seemed A LOT more prepared than I was and had zero in the way of nerves. He just got the better of me. I count myself quite lucky as he broke the ribs of the guy he fought in the next round so just getting arm barred seems a narrow escape.
I went back and collected myself up and continued warming up (dumbass). It didn't seem long before my second fight (thankfully due to the repecharge system) was called. I was faced off against an exceptionally tall dude called Ryan Bassett who fights out of Chris Rees Academy.I was fortunate to have Chris Cook there to film it which I will attach below.
This guy didn't even give me a second to try for a takedown, jumping guard pretty much straight away. He had quite a strong guard and was immediately trying for a triangle. This being one of my least favourite positions to be in (thanks to club mate Dan Foster) I have watch and drilled a few survival methods and escapes for the triangle recently, so I was quite comfortable with a brace block on his legs allowing me space to breath. I stacked him up high at first although he mixed it up a bit with some trip attempts so I eventually went to my knees (rather than go over and have minimum room to defend myself). I was very conscious of a possible switch to arm bar but it never came and he eventually let up on the triangle attempt.
I was then trying to control his rangy legs for a pass attempt, to which he quickly tried to push me away and get back to his feet. Don't know why now I think back to it but I decided I didn't want him to get back up so grabbed his basing arm and dumped him back on his ass, back into his guard. Perhaps if I'd of let him get up I might of had a chance with my stand up but it's too late for second guessing now. I then spent what seemed like ages trying to pass his guard, eventually going up to my feet for the attempt. At this point he managed to grab my legs and take me down but I was quick to counter and we first came up in 50/50, (although in the video it looks a little bit like I'm reaping his leg :oO) and then I shifted around to get back in his half guard.
At that point I was pleased to note that I was physically stronger than him as I was able to muscle his off side arm to the floor and was ridiculously close with an Americana attempt. Unfortunately he was able to roll me over from there using his half guard to assist him, coming up neatly in my guard and giving him two points on the board.
Two points. My old nemesis. Lost to two points in Bristol. Lost to two points here. I bluffed with a couple of gi choke attempts here and nearly had him with a loop choke. I was also extremely close with an arm bar attempt which he had to do some desperate manoeuvring to avoid. During the scramble I ended up attacking his turtle, trying unsuccessfully for a gi choke from there, before turning around and taking his back...... but with only one hook in. He deftly had my other hook defended with his arm and leg on the floor on that side. I spent valuable seconds at this point trying for a rear naked choke whilst my mates were frantically shouting at me to get my other hook in. Ryan was very clever in defending this when I finally decided to try and the match ended with me trying to turn around him to take mount and him turning on his side to defend and catching my lower leg in half guard.
As you can imagine, I'm pretty gutted about how it ended. I definitely feel I had the ability to win that one at the end there if I'd fought wisely. I even had the advice and support. I just didn't listen quick enough. Again. D'oh! With all that control at the end, I could've found any number of ways to get a couple of cheeky points and win the match (I was ahead on advantages). But I instead tried to finish it with a sub. Now I know this has always been my mentality to want the sub finish but if I'm going to enter these competitions (and I AM going to enter these competitions!), I need to accept that sometimes I need to play the points game. Play it safe first. If I'd of considered this back when I had Ryan in my guard I could've just gone for a quick sweep and got the points (something I'm always berating myself for) but noooo, I seem to always try for the sub.
Serves my losing ass right. Until I drill this must sub mentality out of myself, this will probably keep happening. But it certainly isn't going to stop me from entering.
I'm going to enter the one in February at Hereford. And I'm going train my ass off for this one so I have more confidences going in. Half the battle is with your confidence so I'd pretty much already lost that first fight.
But the second one was down to inexperience and naivety on my behalf and that is something I will have to train and drill out of myself. Even if I have to train whole sessions playing purely for points or something. I've gotta wise up. Learn from this and move on.
It was a great day out up at the Hereford Open, even though I didn't win a match. The event was brilliant. Everybody was friendly. I really can't wait for the next one in February!
Glutton for punishment or stubborn to the bone. I refuse to stop. I will be back for another try. And another. And another. Until the confidence and experience come, and the wins start rolling in.
I love this Art. I love this Sport. I will not quit.
Oh yeah.... Here's that vid I promised. Tell me what you think.
