Grappling Tips Newsletter

A few weeks ago I went to a training session with the goal of working on and experimenting with the so-called "Sao Paulo" guard pass. My plan for sparring this day was to start in my partner's closed guard, and then only use this one guard pass.

I spent the session training with one guy: a competitive brown belt who was about 15 lbs lighter than me. I'm heavier, stronger and more experienced. Should've been an easy sparring session, right?

Ummm, not so much...

That sparring session could be accurately described as long periods of deadlock, interrupted only by brief periods of him severely kicking my butt. After forty-five minutes he'd submitted me twice from his guard, swept me several times, and I HADN'T passed his guard once.

On my way home, though, I had a great big smile on my face. As far as I was concerned, the training session had been a great success!

You see, the previous time I'd worked with this same guard pass I'd had a hell of time surviving in the guard of a blue belt. 'Only' getting submitted two times this day by a brown belt was actually an improvement.

Furthermore, the fact that there were now long periods of stalemate meant that I was doing some things right. And my sparring partner told me that I'd actually been close to passing several times.

By the end of the sparring session I'd identified several sticking points in that guard pass - situations for which I had no good answers. These are times when the best thing you can do is go home, brainstorm for potential solutions and then test those solutions in sparring on another day.

So don't freak out about tapping out. Cut yourself some slack, especially if you're experimenting with a new technique, or tactic or strategy. If I can consider a training session successful despite getting tapped out multiple times by a lighter and lower-ranked grappler, then what are you worried about?

Labels: ChimChim, guard passes, training

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A bunch of people have recently emailed me, basically asking if I'm still alive. I haven't been sending out my normal volume of grappling tips and beginner lessons recently, and they want to know why!

You see, I've been working like mad on the Online Grappling Concepts course that I'm delivering at my new site, Grapplearts.tv. I'm really enjoying creating those lessons, but it takes a lot of time to write, film, edit and encode each weekly lesson. And the 15 to 25 page PDFs that accompanies each weekly lesson. And the occasional bonus video.

Anyway, that's the reason I haven't been posting quite as much recently. Thought you might want to know why!

But I HAVEN'T completely forgotten about you. That's why I want to talk about an easy way to prevent injury.

This tip comes from my heart, because I learned this lesson first hand when I injured my first BJJ teacher (and friend) Pshemek Drabchinsky.

Once upon a time we were grappling. I was on top and things seemed to be going well (this was unusual at the time because he was way more skilled than I). However on this day I almost had him pinned! Pshemek is one of those Daddy Long Legs kind of grapplers, and he was trying to put me back into his guard using his long, flexible and agile legs.

He was pushing on my hip with his hand to make enough room to bring his legs into play.

To thwart his defense I twisted my hips: this is one good option, because changing the angle of your body this way often collapses your opponent's arms.

Unfortunately this time I did it a little to abruptly and a little too fast.



There was pop!

And he gasped in pain.

His fingers had got caught on my body and when I twisted my hips he couldn't get his hand out in time. In effect I had applied a hard, uncontrolled wristlock on my training partner without meaning to do so. His wrist took more than a year to heal completely, and I felt bad about it the whole time.

There are eight small bones, and a lot of ligaments and nerves in the wrist. Unfortunately if something is broken in there, then the fractures is often missed by a non-specialist looking at an X ray. (So if you or someone you know severely injures the wrist, or if a nagging wrist injury just won't heal, then get hand specialist to take a look at you, and not just the regular ER doc...).

Anyway, I don't mean to scare you you, but I hope I've made my point that wrist injuries are not to be taken lightly.

If someone is pushing your body then go ahead and use the body twist to neutralize his arms. Just don't do it super-abruptly and with a lot of weight on his hands.

And if you're pushing from the bottom then be aware of the dangers. Be aware of the angles and positioning of your wrists and hands, and be ready to collapse your arms in before you get inadvertently wristlocked. Better to live and fight another day from the bottom of sidemount than have your training cut short by a hyperextended wrist.

Train safe, because as BJJ black belt David Meyer says, "Injury is the enemy!"

Labels: Injuries, positions

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I have this thing against Mc Donalds' Restaurants. It's partially the taste, partially the poor nutritional quality of the food, and partially because the multinational logo of "billions and billions served" drives me nuts.

And I've felt like this a long time. In fact, when I was 12 years old I made up my mind not to eat at Mc Donald's ever again.

I was a stubborn little tyke, and grew up to be a stubborn man. So I actually went for 23 years without eating any food from the golden arches. Not fries, not an ice cream, not a Big Mac.

I've only fallen off the wagon once since I made that decision as a pre-teen. And that happened six years ago when I was part of the emergency response to a flooded town zone. We were evacuating the citizens, setting up pumps, and wading around in cold, hip deep water for hours.

Eventually the fire chief showed up with food and - you guessed it - it was from Mc Donald's.

I was cold. I was starving. I ate the food.

My system survived the assault of the yellow arches, but now I've had to start my crusade from the beginning again. As a result I've been Mc Donald's free for six years now.

Now I'm not a saint when it comes to nutrition. I indulge in junk food occasionally. And anyone who knows me also knows that I couldn't resist dark chocolate if my life depended on it.

But in the final analysis, I think I'm fairly nutrition conscious. I do a pretty good job of eating healthy food, even a lot of organic food, at least most of the time.

In fact, I think that nutrition is one of the most neglected aspects of grappling training. This is ironic, because it's actually one of the training areas in which you have the most control. And the results are relatively immediate and altogether remarkable.

When it comes to performance you can't do much about your genetics. You got what you got from your parents, and now you're stuck with it (at least until gene-splicing technology takes a big jump forward).

You also may not have control over how often you train. Maybe hitting the mats twice a week is all you can get away with and not end up divorced.

And depending on your circumstances, you may not even have control over where you train and who you train with. if you live in a small town, for example, then your school may be the only show in town.

But nobody is forcing you to eat junk food, or to guzzle a giant soda, or to swing through the Mc Donald's drive through on a daily basis (except if you're in a flood zone).

Now there are a million miracle diets and eating plans out there. Each one of them claims to be the sole answer, and most of them contradict each other. But almost all experts agree on a few things, like:

• sugar is bad for you,
• excessive refined starches (flour, rice, etc) are bad for you,
• deep-fried food is bad for you,
• non-deep fried vegetables are good for you (and you should eat twice as many as you do now),
• you should have a balanced diet with protein, carbohydrates and healthy fats,
• you should drink lots of water,
• you should have a source of Omega 3 fatty acids (like in fish oils),
• you should eat (or drink) a mixture of carbohydrates and protein soon after you finish a workout,
• etc.
  

I wouldn't be going on and on about this, if I didn't think that nutrition wasn't so damn important to athletic performance. In a sense, nutrition is the very cornerstone of athletic performance.

• train harder
• recover faster
• feel better
• get injured less often
• get sick less often
• live longer
  

It amazes me how many people eat like crap and then spend hundreds of dollars on supplements. There are only a very few supplements that work, and even then good nutrition wins out over good supplements every single time.

If you're not getting the nutrients you need, and if you're not staying away from the bad stuff, then you'll never reach your true potential in this sport!

P.S. One cool (and free) resource on the subject of nutrition is Billy Hofacker's Ultimate Quick-Start Recipe Guide. Billy operates trainingformmafitness.com, and sends out a very informative training newsletter, so he understands the nutritional needs of grapplers.

Just click on the link below to download his recipe guide:

http://www.trainingformmafitness.com/support-files/ultimate-quick-start-recipe-guide.pdf

Then if you like what you get then go and sign up for his newsletter too!

Labels: fitness, nutrition

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