Day 115

I've spent the last two and half weeks in Portugal. Being here has been good, but my arm threw a bit of a pip poppity wobbily, i.e. it was popped a lot during training last week on Wednesday, even though I'd rested it for 10 days and it felt quite strong. This has thrown a serious spanner in the World Champion plans. I think it's too early to be worrying about that just yet though. Instead I'll just talk about training here in Portugal.

On Wednesday 27th of April, I made my way across to Royce Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, the Algarve section in a town about 30 minutes West of Faro airport (by car) called Lagoa.
The club was run by two aptly named purple belts, Jorge y José. I was impressed with the turn out. About 20 people over 16 and 10 little little ones. About 5 blue belts.
The training was your standard fair. Warm up, technique, positional sparring, full sparring. The session was two hours which gave plenty of time for positional and full sparring, which was great. The technique always started with a couple of self defense/stand up techniques. Something which I have found is often over looked, and to my shame I usually try and avoid stand up and just want to do ground work. It was interesting following the techniques for the first time in Portuguese, but the teachers were happy to translate and during the positional sparring explanation it was pretty obvious we were doing sweep, submit from bottom, guard pass from top. BJJ - pretty much the same all over the world (Portugal, Germany and England checked so far).

The instructor rolling with a blue belt.

It was a good week and a great place to train, really friendly and still a high level of Jiu-jitsu given the lack of Brown/Black belts. I would say it was rather expensive at €30 for the week (probably got the tourist rate), but I don't mind supporting a great club that is spreading Jiu-Jitsu.

The obligatory post training photo.....

Soooo. Definitely just go there for training if you go on holiday to the Algarve. I know some of you do.