Day 2

Wednesday evenings is open mat for competition training. I decided to use the time to do a little bit of kettle bell training and followed by a short roll. After that I was determined to do a yoga session. I know most people who do BJJ know how important flexibility is, but most people do not do yoga, or even stretch properly before or after rolling... Myself included, although I love yoga and have been doing it off and on for about 3 years. And yet, when it comes down to a choice between forcing my own limbs into awkward positions or someone elses, BJJ wins every time. My girlfriend thoughtfully bought me an audio version of a yoga work out done by our teacher to help me do more yoga, however so far I’ve started it 6 or 7 times since Christmas and only managed to do the whole thing once. The voice does encourage me to do the correct postures and hold them for the correct length of time, but now I find myself groaning at my [unbranded fruit based music player] when it instructs me to the lateral right-angled bend. Absolute nightmare. This night was no exception, and while I did manage the aforementioned horrible bend, I proceeded to skip all but my very favourite postures (just doing the easy ones then) and probably didn’t benefit too much from my yoga session. The rest of the training was successful with my kettle bells and 20 minutes of rolling... Yes that’s right it’s the second day of training for the BJJ world championship and so far I’ve managed to do 25 minutes of sparring. Good start. This post is not about training; I want to talk about something which happened at the open mat.

During training, a white and a blue belt were rolling (no gi) and the white belt put a leg lock on the blue belt. I don’t know exactly which lock it was, as I wasn’t watching, I only saw the result, which was the blue belt clutching his knee which had ‘popped’ and the white belt apologising profusely. Now I’m going to be completely honest. Leg locks scare the shit out of me. I’m the survivor of double knee operations and I still wouldn’t consider myself fully healed 3 years down the line. So when it comes to someone else manipulating a very injury prone, already weakened joint of mine, that is integral to walking, with the intent of causing injury, I think... hell no. I know there is always a debate between those who find leg locks very effective and those who think attacking the legs is a ‘dirty tactic’ or unsportsmanlike behaviour, and in gi competition it isn’t allowed at the lower belts, but in no gi it is allowed. I am firmly in the no leg lock camp, even though I think that they are very effective and useful in competition. I once rolled in training with a massive guy (120kg easily) no gi, who asked me if it was ok if he did heel hooks. I told him fine, but that I would immediately tap when he did. After sparring for 5 or 10 minutes it quickly became apparent that he didn’t have the speed or technique to pass my guard and I didn’t have the weight (80kg) or technique to sweep him, so he latched onto my leg and dropped back for a heel hook. I tapped immediately. To me that is a question of wanting to prove how large my balls are or wanting to spending 6 months minimum in rehab, that’s if my knee would ever recover from a third operation. The answer is very small balls. We repeated this process a couple of times before the end of a not particularly productive roll. Well, except towards the end I used his chest as a lever to rip my leg free of his grasp before he could think of a heel hook, but that still left us at a stalemate.

My problem with leg locks is that I have this experience and make that decision every time, but I can easily, very easily understand how people would make the other choice, the one this blue belt (who was younger than me and probably had good knees) made in the heat of the roll. It is competition, it may be a game of chess, and it may only be training but at the end of the day it is fighting and if you are on the mat you are competitive to some degree or another and that combined with some who doesn’t know what they are doing (a white belt for instance) grabbing onto your foot, thinking, if I pull a little bit harder, twist a little bit more he will tap, while the other person is thinking if I just hold on a bit longer I can escape... and then POP. Was it worth it?