Visitors from the North...

Hi all, last night was the first Thursday night class for 2007 and it couldn't have been better! We Were lucky enough to have 8 of our good friends from BJJ Launceston on the mat, who were down for a visit. The resulting class size certainly showed that it will be nice to have the 40 square metres more mats space we are planning on when we upgrade our mats soon.

I decided to spend some time on striking as well as a takedown and submission so after the warmup (courtesy of Adam Newton who ran it while I got everyone signed in) we moved onto a multiple station striking exercise. In the exercise we drilled many combos of: punches, elbows, knees and front kicks as well as weaves and reflex drills.

Our next action was to work our "Fence, Question, Go!" setups progressing from a strike, to a strike with a takedown to knee ride and eventually adding an arm bar to finish. As always before practicing a takedown we spent some time on safe falling. I like to work on "Safe Falling" as opposed to "break falling", the 2 principles I push are 1. Keep your arms in (don't land on an out stretched arm, big injury risk) and 2. Squat down to counteract the force pushing you back. As with all falling it is also necessary to learn to control the speed of your own fall.

Moving onto the technique progression; we started with the Fence, question, GO! Using a straight right for the strike. After drilling this we added a modified double leg takedown to, stepping past the opponent with our outside leg. The next stage is to consolidate the takedown, do this by keeping their knees squeezed together and step the rear leg past to a knee ride position, grabbing the near arm in a figure 4 grip. Finally Step over the opponents head and sit back into an arm bar to finish.

Our final exercise for the night was to add some resistance; the person being taken down was to try and pull guard on their opponent and the person doing the taken down has to pass to knee ride and get the arm bar. Essentially the same drill, but with resistance.

On a whole I had a lot of fun and hope everyone else did to, I do think it was a real benefit to our newer students to see a real cross section of experience on one mat. It gives an idea of what we can aspire to achieve, particularly having 3 purple belts training with us.

Thanks see you soon!