Bahrain BJJ

For anyone looking to start or continue training Brazilian Jiujitsu while in Bahrain, they should check out Reza's Martial Arts Center. The school teaches Brazilian Jiujitsu, Thai Boxing, Mixed Martial Arts, Capoeira and has its own gym facilities. Classes are taught by Reza Monfaradi, a BJJ black belt under Roy Harris of the Joe Moreira lineage, and have regular guest black belt instructors coming over from Brazil to add a different flavour to the class. The Thai Boxing is taught by a professional Thai fighter brought over from Thailand and is a very good class too. Capoeria, starting in October, will be taught by a Brazilian, again coming over from Brazil.

The Brazilian Jiujitsu class is at the core of the academy program. The class has a good variety of students with many purple and blue belts regularly attending. Training is aimed at increasing all areas of BJJ, from fitness and technique to live sparring. The school attends as many tournaments as it can, venturing as far as the USA and Thailand to compete. With Abu Dhabi so close by, the BJJ Asian Super Cup and the Professional Cup are also attended every year. Starting in October, Rodrigo Mangabeira, black belt from Nova Geracao team in Brazil, will be co-instructing the class along with Reza Monfaradi.

Brazilian Jiujitsu classes run everyday apart from Fridays, and are from 7 to 830pm. However, starting in mid October, there will be 2-3 BJJ classes everyday! While the class is BJJ, there are variation classes throughout the week:

Sundays and Wednesdays are no gi BJJ

Mondays are 'circuit training' and involve king of the hill style rolling

Thursdays are similar to open mat but vary from 5 minutes, 10 minutes and unlimited time rounds

Jits in Bahrain

First post from sunny Bahrain! I have been here for 4 days now and am still settling in but its nice to see all my family, friends and old training partners again. However, I can't help myself from wondering what the guys in Eastbourne are drilling or what technique is 'move of the day' at the moment. I keep finding myself thinking about what move I might be able to pull off, only to realise I now traing at a completely different school and need to adapt my game to exploit the weakneses in a whole new group of people. That being said, after having a few training sessions I don't think I will be making any big unplanned changes to my game. What worked before still seems to work now and if anything I seem to be much clearer on which submissions I am aiming for when we spar. Usually I will take the first few minutes of the roll to mess around or try a new move out before going to my bread and butter, but now I know exactly what I want to do before the time starts. I am not sure what changed - it might be training with strangers, or having a new belt, but something definitely happened thats upped my game!

Ramadan has just finished in Bahrain and it is now the Eid holidays for three days, which unfortunately means no training. However, on a positive note, starting Wednesday training will be aimed at competing at the Asian Super Cup tournament in around three months. This entails much more conditioning, sparring and competition specific training which will hopefully allow me to work on my weaknesses. Right now I feel I need to work on several areas, including improving my knee on belly and top half guard game. But this shouldn't be a problem as training is 6 days a week! For the short term future I will not be working just yet as I need to see what jobs are available and which are best suited for me, but this means more time to train.

Speaking of complimentary training, me and Rach bought a large swiss ball today to work on core strength, balance and flexability. They have several of these at Reza's academy and the other night I worked up a sweat trying to balance on one of the balls of around 30 minutes. Hopefully it will look something like this in a few short weeks:



and not like this...