Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Great training with Rey

The last two days, I have been training with Rey Diogo as he visited my gym in Copenhagen. Monday he did a seminar for about 35 of our students and tuesday, I took a private lesson with him. I had planned to train for a few hours with him tuesday, but the weather was very hot so we only lasted one.


I got a lot of good little details out of training with Rey. I like his simple approach to Jiu Jitsu with focus on the basics. That's the same foundation I am trying to build my own game around (with just a liiiittle fancy stuff on the top :D).

After the seminar, Rey promoted five of our guys to blue belt. Two of them are of "the new generation" in the gym and the other three has been around for many years. He also authorized me to give out some blue belts myself in the gym, since we don't get visits from black belts that often. Giving out my first blue belt would be a very big thing for me, so we'll see when or if I will use the opportunity.


I will definately go visit Rey again in L.A., maybe even later this year when I am planning a short trip to New York and Mexico. He is in Sweden every year, so we will try and get him down here every time since it is really close by.

Now I will head to the gym for more training! :)

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Being a full time ninja is STILL the shit

Training is amazing. I've been completely injury free for 3 months straight and sparring in the gym has been really good. The team is so strong right now and every single roll I have with my training partners is highly challenging physically and technically. I feel like I improve my game really well at the moment and I enjoy training so much it obviously has an effect on my teaching. Overall, training and teaching Jiu-Jitsu full time is STILL a lot of fun here two and a half years after I quit my job as graphical designer in a boring computer company :D


Tomorrow I am picking up Rey Diogo from the airport. I trained with him in California during my trip to USA last year. It was good training and he was a cool guy, so when I found out that he regularly was teaching in a gym in Sweden only 300 kilometers from Copenhagen, it was easy to arrange a visit to my gym. He is gonna stay here for two days and do a seminar in my gym tomorrow morning that I am looking very much forward to. I have also planned on taking some private lessons with him both tomorrow and tuesday. I'll make sure to write about my training with Rey here in the blog when he has left :)


Another story of my life is that I successfully promoted my second big MMA show a few weeks ago, Adrenaline 2. It was an amazing experience and I am so eager to keep developing this event and watch it grow bigger and bigger. I'll write more about my experiences as promoter in another post later.

Also, I have some more posts lined up for the blog along with some new technique videos I have had in my mind for so long I need to do something about them now. And in one month I am going to London to attend UFC 85 and cheer for danish fighter Martin Kampmann, be sure to find a post about that trip here as well! Keep checking back from time to time, updates WILL come eventually ;)
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