Martial Farts

The little training group is coming along well! Last Sunday there were six people there! All of them serious.

Sometimes I get a little self conscious when teaching, especially when I am teaching 90 or 100 kilo guys who are training to be professional fighters, but I have to just get over it and do it. One thing I realised (I might be wrong on this though) is that the instructor doesn’t have to be the toughest one in the room, but he has to be the guy willing to take responsibility for the class. Deciding what to teach, how to teach, etc.

I think I am destined to be an average competitor but maybe a good instructor. I love teaching, anyway.

We worked on the sprawl position… what to do once you’ve sprawled. From the top, we did the anaconda choke and the brabo choke. From underneath, the sitout escape and the wrestler hip toss kind of thing. Man, I literally have no BJJ vocabulary anymore, the result of years of training in a different language.

Sparring was good. I like to go light on people and see what they can do. Most people take full advantage and start ripping my arms off and choking my neck in. It’s good, I’m letting go of my ego, something very important I think, especially for an instructor.

One thing that I keep saying to myself and the guys training is “the point of training is not to beat up your training partner, but to improve.” That’s it.

Of course every now and then I have to go up into top gear to reassure my fragile ego that yes, my five years of jiu jitsu is worth something, but hey, everybody’s human.

I’m doing a couple of private classes and they are going well. We have a good routine where the last class of each month is a review, and we go over all the techniques we’ve done in detail and break them down. As a result we have ironed out some problems we were having with the brabo choke (that it was ending up as a painful neck crank rather than a choke.) We sorted it out (hike up the shoulder so that it applies pressure on the other side, don’t dig too deep with the hand around the neck, etc.)

I’m really enjoying training, but I am really, really missing the gi, and competing with the gi. I might just wear my gi when training with these guys, so that at least I can get used to the feeling of it again. I want to compete in it soon.

I’m also over the moon at the moment because a lot of people have bought things from Scramble Stuff, my online store where you can find cool things (t-shirts, DVDs) from Japan. Check it out!