Thursday, January 8, 2009

795 flighthours

So I finally got past the first 200 hours of sparring for my flighthours project. I have been having a little problems with my right shoulder for the last month and a half or so, so I have not been able to lift any weights or do full intensity sparring. It is getting better now though, and I am slowly starting to pick up the pace in sparring again. I have shot some sparring video for the flighthours archive.

As always, I have a very specific list on what I am working on improving in sparring at the moment. I had a great period before the last competition, where I worked on my A-game, and after that I have felt more like playing around with a little more "advanced" techniques, which my sparring shows very clearly.

My focus have been on implementing technically difficult moves, just to challenge myself to raise the bar for what I can execute in full resistance sparring. Several of the moves have been inspired by Ryan Hall's game. The current list looks like this:

- Rolling backtake from sidecontrol
- Inverted guard as defense and offense
- "Double-jump" guardpasses (I will make a video on this shortly)
- Setting up x-guard and sweeping
- Fireman's carry takedown
- Basic mount attacks from Saulo's videos (gi)

I will have to wait a little longer to work on the fireman's carry since I can not yet do any wrestling due to my shoulder injury :,(



Other updates:

- I have just gotten off the phone with Caleb from the Fightworks Podcast for an interview for the podcast. I hope it turns out well :)

- We are working our asses off these days to get the new gym ready. I hope we can start training in the beginning of next week!

- Sunday, I am launching a new grappling tournament held in our gym with the exotic name "Shogun Invitational" :D The concept is to make a tournament that is easy to arrange and easy to participate in. The big tournaments are awesome, but for many people it can feel like too much work to prepare and participate in them. This is a once-a-month submission wrestling tournament where people only get one fight. They know their opponent on beforehand, so they can prepare for that one fight, and they don't have to wait around all day. Hope it will be a succes, even my BJJ kids are competing there so really looking forward to it!

- Next sunday, I am off to Thailand for 19 days with my girlfriend. I have looked at some different MMA camps down there, where we will definitely stop by for some grappling training. I will be sure to write some posts about my experiences there :)

4 comments:

Junior Familia said...

it was definately cool
to see you roll bro.
More interesting in the gi, since your more no-gi orientated.

do you feel your transition smooth from gi to nogi ?
also goodluck w/ the gym, the one ur in seems spectacular already.

Anonymous said...

Love the roll from side control to back mount. Did you know the Mendes brothers of Leo Vieira's team showed that in a recent Japanese DVD magazine? I think it was BJJ Spirits...

Also, technical question... How did youtube let you upload a 40min video? It rejected my 15 min one the other day, saying it was too long!

Sonia Hamilton said...

I too really like that roll from side control to back mount - it looks similar to Eddie Bravo's twister game.

Nice reverse guard game, too.

Christian Graugart said...

Actually I have been doing gi more than no-gi, I just tend to for some reason mostly to bring my videocamera to the gym the days where we do no-gi :)

I enjoy both equally much and try to do 50/50.

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