The night before the tournament he came in with his Gi to train. As far as I know this was the first time he has trained while wearing the full Gi. He wears the jacket frequently, but not the whole getup. I grabbed him for about 10 minutes of pointers for the competition primarily consisting of "Don't let them grab your collar. Posture up is safer than head down when the Gi is involved" and other things like that. I also showed him the baseball bat choke from side control and mount and he repped it maybe twice.
Fast forward to Saturday and I'm checking facebook and see that some videos are up from the tournament:
That right there is my boy Brian winning his blue belt using a choke he learned the day before and practiced for 5 minutes. The guy is a beast and if I can finally lure him away from his obsession with Muay Thai and cracking peoples skulls he's going to be a complete badass.
The rest of the night friday was taken up with more halfguard work. It was a small class, so I ended up rolling mostly with Casey and Ian, so I didn't get to work quite as much of my tournament game since both of them are around 200lbs, but I did work really hard on my passing and whatnot against Casey and was able to block a couple more tricks this time. A lot of good rolls and I did get plenty of grip work in, so that's always good.
Tonight is the No-Gi class, so mostly just going to play around in this one. Focus on movement, mobility, and general flow.
Amazing how that small bit of teaching makes such a difference!
ReplyDeleteI remember when I taught a white belt a simple rolling kneebar and he won his next Naga intermediate nogi match in 9 seconds with it. Crazy.