Naga Prep

I took a long memorial weekend off, and there was no class sunday or monday. This gave me some time to help heal up some nagging injuries. It's annoying to hear people bitch about injuries. Rarely in the grappling arts are people 100% though, and how well you listen and take care of your body goes a long way to the quality of your lifestyle. I did get a light 4-5 mile run in on Monday, to try and remind my body that it's almost tourney time.

Tuesday nights class Hyde taught some chokes. He did one I like a lot which is from the top half guard. I have seen this before, but Hyde gave some great details. When someone has a good underhook, and you overhook (whizzer) it; you take your whizzer arm and grab the guys collar as deep as you can. You then take your other hand and come around his head to grab some gi material by his collar. The keys are to pinch your elbow down to tighten the grip, and then side shrimp to cinch the choke. A similar version is shown here.

It's just a couple days before Naga Milwaukee, and I'm pretty pumped. We organized a couple carloads of people to go down and got our hotels booked. I'm going in the 180-189 class, and I weigh about 192 right now, so weight should be too bad of an issue. I wish I was a little more disciplined this past month as I think the 170's division would be ideal for me, since I'm generally at a height, width, and strength disadvantage to most guys in the 180's based on my past experience.

I'm going to go to no-gi class today, and gi class tomorrow night before leaving for Milwaukee friday. My goal is to make the finals of my blue belt division, and to win the intermediate no-gi; and have as much fun as possible. I want to use good jiu-jitsu and limit my mistakes. I truly think that's what it's all about.

I leave you with the final intermediate no-gi match from the Toledo BJJ Open a couple weekends ago. This is me (camo shorts) and my teammate Mark battling for the gold. We argued for a while to see if we were actually going to fight or not. Eventually we did, and we both kind of screwed around a little bit, but had fun.