BJJ British Open 2009

Yesterday was the biggest competition in the UK, and possibly in Europe, excluding the Europeans. It was a really great tournament with such a high level of jiujitsu! I was quite suprised the distance people travelled to compete, with some competitors coming all the way from the US and many travelling from Europe and all parts of the UK. Brazilian Top Team did very well, claiming silver in the team trophy category and taking quite a few golds and silvers. The guys from the Eastbourne branch of Ze Marcelo won two golds and two silver...there were only 5 of us!

Training for this competition was a little less than some of the other ones I have done this year because I had my final exams and wasnt as focused as I could have been and have been in the past. I checked my weight on the Wednesday (the competition was on Sunday) and was around 4 kg over! This led to some serious sweat sessions and hardly any food over the next couple of days. I was still trying to loose weight on the night before the competition at 1230, even though we had to be up at 3:30am to drive up to Birmingham! I can't tell you much about the drive up there as I was in pretty much a zombie state by this point and ended up sleeping the whole journey up there.

In what is turning out to be a routine for us, we got there way before anyone else - before the place was even open infact! Rocking up at 0730am when the event was supposed to start at 0930am wasn't great, but better early than late eh? After much standing around and clock watching, all the competitors were let in and everyone went off to establish their camps in various corners. While the venue had a huge matted area consisting of 8 mats, the spectator and warm up area were very small and cramped. Basically if you were not fighting, you were stuck standing as there was no room to even sit! Luckily we found a bit of space and used our bags to create a little fortress for ourselves.

I was on quite quickly as the call for lightweight was pretty much as soon as the doors opened! For once I was really calm and relaxed before going on the mats, and had time to stretch as best as I could and run through my game plan a couple times in my head. I was also lucky enough to have Ze Marcello in my corner, which helped out loads! The first two fights were hard and it took me a while to get my head in the game properly, but I managed to get through the first and second round, winning on points. After that I got with the it a bit more and finished the next three matches by north-south choke. Since me and another team mate, Sushi, both made it to the finals, we split the gold between us!

Rach did a great job aswell, despite having 5 stitches in her arm and having a cold, winning Gold in the female lightweight division, adding to her winning streak :). Sophie Cook got silver in the rooster weight female division and Pete got silver in the heavyweight division. Well done guys! Lee Fynch also competed for the first time, doing a great job and representing the team.

Once I finished my fights I stuffed my face with sausage rolls, sandwhiches, chicken, cereal bars, chocolate and loads of energy drinks! Eventually I began to feel normal again and hlped the other guys with their fights. The rest of the day was a mad rush of running from one corner of the hall to the other, screaming encouragement and causing general mayhem. It was great seeing the black belts and brown belts fight as well as all the purple belts from Ze Marcello's team. Oliver Geddes was also there and didn't disapoint, pulling and winning using his great half guard game, something I am trying to work on myself at the moment.

I am going to do another entry in more detail in a couple days when I have got together all the pictures and videos, but that should be enough for now. Happy Training!

ZT Fight Skool BJJ Competition

Yesterday was the first ever BJJ competition held by Ivam Maciel of ZT fight skool in Brighton! It was a really smoothly run event, with all competitors having their own name tag displayed on a huge white board which were moved around depending who they had to fight next. It was a really good system and made it so much easier to find out what was going on! While the original categories were only above 77kg and below 77kg, so many competitors signed up they had to add categories for under 88kg, under 98kg and over 98kg!

The morning of the Sunday saw a bunch of guys from BTT Eastbourne meeting up and making our way down to Brighton. As usual, I had just enough time to weigh in, stretch for 15 minutes, and then it was time for the light weight division. I had three fights, finishing two of them with a north/ south choke and winning one on points, before coming up against my team mate Adam ( Gym Sparta) who beat me on points! After helping everyone else with their fights and coaching a few of the guys who were competing for the first time it was time for the absolute. This also went well, seeing me beat two guys with the north/ south choke again before loosing to a 130kg judo black belt who went on to win the whole thing! I was happy with how I did on the day considering I haven't had time to train as much as I would have liked, due to having so much work to do for university.

Overall Team BTT Eastbourne took gold (Adam Urbanski), silver (Steve Stone) and bronze (me) in the lightweight, gold in the light heavyweight (Peter Kuapil) as well as silver (Pete again) and bronze (me again) in the absolute. For a small town team we did really well and I think its a great demonstration that Team Eastbourne will definitely be a force to be reckoned with in the near future!

It was a really well organised competition and a really great local tournament to help guys with their first competition jitters. The British BJJ Open is coming up in June so its going to be time to step up the training again! Hopefully I will be done with unviersity in the next week or so and then I can focus on BJJ 100% again!

Ze Marcello seminar Eastbourne

Last week we had a very informative seminar by Ze Marcello, who came down from the Slough Academy to teach at the Canton gym. I am used to seeing around a maximum of 20 people on the mats at Canton, so having 32 participants running around and doing breakfalls was quite shocking, but fun.



During the seminar Ze went over the half guard game, focusing specifically on sweeps. I think we went over around 3 sweeps, each with an additional counter move in case the opponent blocked the original one. Unfortunately I only managed to record the last two, but these are more than enough to keep me busy for a while! Its nice to have a bit more half guard in my arsenal as half guard is usually just a transition position for me. We rolled for around 45 minutes at the end of the seminar and I was lucky enough to go with a black belt from Barcelona who came along with Ze. Here are some photos from the day:

Brighton Grab and Pull Competition

Last weekend was the Brighton Grab and Pull competition! It was a great tournament which was run very smoothly and on time. Although there was only 10 of us from Brazilian Top Team competing, we walked away with 5 gold medals, 2 silver and 3 bronze out of a total of around 250 competitiors! Well done guys! I was much less nervous than the last competition and had a good game plan to work with. I made it to the finals of the light weight devision (5 fights) and then unfortunately lost by referee decision... there had been no points or advantages scored. I was pissed off, but i guess it could have gone either way, although I would have liked the fight to have gone into extra time. In the absolute devision there were some big guys, but I managed to make it to the finals after another 5 rounds. However, as it was me and another member of BTT in the finals (team members dont fight each other at our club)we drew and both got gold.


Rach won the girls devision, continuing her winning streak from the Bristol Open! Well done Rach! It was great day and was the ultimate reward for all the training between now and the last competition. I am off to Bharain for a two week holiday, where I should get a few training sessions in at Team Reza's academy. However, right now all I am interested in is eating lots of good food and relaxing for a few days. Videos and pics to follow

A Quick Update

I have been very busy with university work this week with several deadlines coming up and havn't had time to check the blog out. So I was pleasantly suprised to see there is a (very) modest amount of traffic on the site! Yay! It should be getting much more interesting on here in the next couple weeks as I have a competition coming up next week and then a trip back to Bahrain where I'll get to train with the guys at Team Reza. Bring on the hardcore training! This is just a quick update to tell everyone to keep reading as there is going to be loads on here very, very soon! Here are some pics of Rach finishing her Bristol Open final fight with an ezekiel choke, right as her opponent was tapping. Well done Rach!

Cardio for Jiujitsu

Alot of people seem to gas when we roll during class. Like really gas. Like hyperventilating gas. They start by going all red around 3 minutes into the round. Then a vein begins to throb in their forehead as they start foaming at the mouth and their eyes bulge like fish. Yes. Just like fish.

Is it unfair that we judge people who don't train as hard or as often as we do? I don't think it is...

Anyway, as the Brighton BJJ competition is approaching in a few weeks, we decided to start two extra classes a week focusing just on cardio for BJJ. Some of the guys have MMA fights soon, while some of us have BJJ tournaments and others just want to improve their game. So now we have BJJ classes 3 times a week with 2 additional cardio classes. And this is only at Canton Gym! There is also the saturday Sparta Gym class, the sunday BTT slough class and the ZT fight school BJJ class on the other days! Alot of training do to, alot of classes to attend, alot of stuff to think about.

Today was the first cardio class. My girlfriend is in her last year of a sport and exercise science degree so she put together a class to improve both aerobic and anaerobic cardio applied to BJJ. We started off with half an hour of constant drills such as frog jumps, prayer jumped, seated leg jumps, bear crawls, crab walks, high knees, butt kickers, breakfalls, front roles, back roles, kart wheels, take down shuffles and a bunch of other stuff. It was a constant tempo which slowly got everyone sweating like crazy and breathing hard at the end. Then we did some stretching to bring everyone's heart rate down before doing some anaerobic drills. These were 3 intense circuits, 6 minutes a circuit with explosive exercises like sprawls, burpies, running man, knee to chest jumps, etc. The class was rounded off by doing 50 frog jump/ take downs. It probably doesn't sound like much in writing but it worked very well and it felt me with a feeling of anticipation. If everyone keeps this up there won't be anymore red faces, throbbing veins, foaming mouths or bulging fish eyes...