Day 1

Pre Training
BJJ world championships t-minus 6 months. Training starts today in preparation for the European Jiu- Jitsu championships. As I have previously stated and the name of the blog suggests I plan in June to become the World Champion of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (at blue belt middle weight, you can leave this part out when you inform other people of my plans) and I need to train a lot to become a Jiu-Jitsu Champion. Although, today is my first day and well I have a confession... my knees hurt, both of them, and I haven't even got to training yet! I've just had a protein shake, chocolate mint? Not bad, obviously not bad after you considerably lower your expectations, as is necessary for any kind of sports nutritional supplement beverage. Anyway bad knees not a good start, but as a very eccentric head of P.E. at my school once said to me “When the going gets tough the tough get going!” I have no idea where he got that one from, but you must understand that he didn't just take me aside and tell me this in preparation for hurty knees almost 10 years later, it was said to a class of 10 year olds during one particularly cold rugby session. Inspirational

Post Training

I went to my first training session this evening. I was excited because it had been a week or so since I’d rolled due to Christmas & New years. So excited that I blindly ignored the ‘Absolute Anfänger’ (absolute beginners) tag that had been applied to this class. I reasoned that a warm up is a warm up at any level, the basic techniques can always be improved and what my training really needed, was a sparring session whaling on some white belts to get me fired up and feeling confident. How wrong I was... The class was taken by a purple belt, who was late (He’s Brazilian, need I say more?), there were four or five completely new students, possibly due to the New Year, and there were no other blue belts.

When the purple finally arrived, half way through the warm up, he asked me to take all of the white belts that were not absolute anfangers and show them some sweeps, while he worked with the new students. I was simultaneously made excited and nervous by this. Teaching, anything, I worked as a teachers assistant in New Zealand and am a qualified Snowboard instructor, is one of my passions in life and I love to do it (if only it paid better!). But I’ll ask you to think now, if you do BJJ, or any other sport, and you had 5 minutes to plan, what move or technique would you feel confident in demonstrating to white belts, knowing that any technical error you made would be inherited by them so you had better have a dam good move that you know word perfectly... Got one? Good. Now I want three more. Not just three more, three that link into the first one because a good lessons involves 1 type of technique, spider guard sweeps or finishes from the mount for example, where each new technique builds on the previous technique, or accounts for an opponents counter to your initial technique. Ok are you ready? You should be because you’ve had the time and there are 15 students looking to you for direction, knowledge and inspiration... OK I’m going over the top, but there is definitely a bit of pressure.

The purple initially asked me to show some sweeps from butterfly guard and showed me one or two basic ones, which I knew, but as butterfly guard is not a position I regularly use I decided to go with some very basic sweeps from the closed guard. Hey it’s an absolute beginners white belt class!

Finally, did I mention that I am giving this class in my second language (German) and when I write it like this, ‘my second language’ it sounds like I have control of it, I own it, in short that I can speak German. This was very misleading of me, I can’t speak German, I can string together a few sentences, with little to no grammar, about my holiday where I ate pizza and chips and it was sunny. At one point during the lesson my confused brain told me to say to the class ‘Wieder sehen?’ literally translated to ‘again see?’ But really just being ‘aufwiedersehen’ meaning ‘good bye’. Anyway despite the linguistic barrier which is nothing new for BJJ, the class went well.

Near the end, to my shock and horror, I discovered that there would be no sparring in this lesson, only 10 minutes of positional work for the white belts. I had to settle for 5 minutes of sparring with the purple belt post lesson. Not a great start to the training but still a really enjoyable experience.


I've added video of Flower Sweep variations by Ken Primo. I always find his videos quite educational. I showed only the basic sweep and no variations (oops) and then moved onto a sweep underhooking the leg.