Tuesday

Tonight was a very fun class. When I got there, I noticed hardly ANYONE was there. I quickly found out that is because we got our MMA cage set up in the building next door! Everyone was crowded around and a bunch of the MMA guys were sparring about 39 times harder then normal because they were "in da cage".

Class managed to start on time with Crazy Chris taking the lead. We did HIIT sprints as the main cardio followed by about 2 minutes of holding the plank position. That was tough, and I saw guys falling all over the place. That makes the sweat shoot out of my skin.

Chris then had us get in groups of 3. I got paired up with "salty" Jorge and Dan-O. Jorge is a 4 stripe white belt and Dan-O is an assassin who happens to be wearing 2 stripes on his blue belt for the current moment as he shoots up the ladder to stardom. Each person took a turn being in the middle. We did 30 second rounds, where you had to score a point. If you didn't, you had to do 5 pushups. Every 30 seconds, the fresh guy would go in to the group. The "in" person had to go through 6 rounds of rotating fresh opponents. Then the next person in the group was in the middle and the cycle continued. Basically it's straight rolling for like 30 minutes with no more then a 30 second break. Chris changed up the positions every couple rounds. It's great cardio, and great situational rolling. I did OK considering my very game group mates. I scored some, tied some, and lost a couple.

Big Dawg showed us a few collar chokes from different positions for the technique portion of class. The first we learned was from knee on belly and was in the "baseball" grip. See the video below if you don't know what that is. We worked that for a while then he showed the baseball bat choke from guard (similar to what is shown below). Clint then showed a couple other tricky variations that he likes to use. Clint's more of a top player, but has SICK chokes from the guard, so it was a fun class.

Similar technique:


We finished with 30 minutes or so of rolling and I got to roll with Crazy Chris, Crazy Legs Wenstrom, Mike Spears, and Mark "Thesz" Van Tongeren who all have very different and unique games. I tried to work on tight guard passing and armdrags and sweeps from the bottom. I got essentially a "flying flower sweep" on Spears which was fun and probably the highlight of my rolls. As I was rolling with Chris, Clint sat by us and told me I was leaving way too much space which was definitely true and is a common problem of mine. It's just not completely natural to have my hips down to the ground like a BJJ snake. It will come. Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm in this for the long haul =)