My new approach to sidecontrol escapes

As you might have read in one of my recent posts, I am trying to force myself to focus more on escaping sidecontrol, since I think it is the biggest weakness in my game.

I was trying to make an agreement with myself, that I would do at least five escapes every day of training. It worked pretty well in the beginning, but along the way I caught myself forgetting it and not doing any escapes some days. So now I am trying something else. My 1000 flighthours project has been a really good way for me to set a goal for my training, so I have decided to do something similar with my sidecontrol escapes.

In my top secret BJJ notebook, I have made a little table, where I set an X every time I succesfully have escaped sidecontrol in sparring:


My first goal is to reach 100 escapes, then see where that takes me. I will also keep track of the counting here in the blog (look in the right coloumn).

Going to ADCC in Barcelona friday

It never really appealed to me to watch a grappling tournament in a Middle East desert, so when I found out that the ADCC was held in Barcelona this year, I decided to go check it out.

Looking forward to see the biggest submission wrestling competition of all and ofcourse to spend three days in sunny Barcelona on the beach, now it is starting to get a little colder up here in the north :)

Video of our facilities

I just put together this video for our website:

Kids Team moving forward

The last month since I posted last time, has been really good training wise. No injuries worth mentioning, and I have gotten a solid amount of training, sparring and teaching done. The gym is really crowded with people, and it is very, very warm to train there, especially with the gi. I just imagine it is like training in Brazil :D

One of my projects that I care about very much, is my team of BJJ kids. We started this class about four years ago, and in the beginning it was very much a "play and have fun" thing. There was no real goal with the training and we went to one tournament and lost all our fights big. Along the years, this has really changed, and the last year or so, the team has seriously taken off, both training- and ambitionwise. When we started, we had a small group of 7-10 year olds. It was pretty difficult to have them to any "serious" training. They grew older and we changed the age limit of the class to 11-15. Also, I have made set some very specific competition goals for the team and made it clear to anyone who wanted to join, that we train for competing and we expect them to be serious about it. Ofcourse, the training is still fun for the kids and the vibe of the team is most important. Also, noone is ever forced to compete if they don't feel like it.

Obviously, a team like this will naturally limit the number of kids who feel like participating, and I think that is a good thing. I would rather have 10 dedicated students than 40 non-dedicated that are going nowhere. At this moment, we have about 15 very dedicated kids, who train and compete together as a team. It is extremely satisfying to see how they do in competition now compared to how they did four years ago.

Also, I have learned a lot as a coach and teacher from the process. Teaching and coaching kids is really a very different thing than with adults, but I think I have settled on a good formula now and I am very confident that we can make it very far, as long as they feel like going on.

This weekend we went to a competition in Sweden (approx. 70 participants) and did really well. I put together a small highlight video, hope you enjoy it.

Watch out for us at the 2013 Europeans!! ;)

CSA.dk Junior Team til Skåneserien 2
by graugart