I am back from a few weeks of vacation. It was really nice to get some sun and warm weather, we haven't had much of that here in Denmark this year.
I have not been sleeping much those two weeks. I have been lying awake for hours every night just thinking about moves that I needed to train and try out, I guess I have a big overload of training in my head everyday that I need to get out in the gym so my brain can realax afterwards :D
I have a LOT of material that I am planning on shooting on video within the next few days to post here. During my sleepless nights, I have thought of so much stuff I want to put up here on the blog, so finally some new material is gonna be here :)
One thing I have thought about a lot lately is how my process of learning has evolved over the last few years. I rarely have someone show me a new technique or detail that I then apply to my game. Mostly, I learn by watching other people roll and try to see the small details that makes their techniques work. It can be watching video of matches online or just watch someone in the gym roll. Anyone really, even the whitebelts teach me something now and then, probably without they know it though :)
I can highly recommend to just sit down and watch someone roll with the purpose of analysing their moves and find out WHY they work. Not just WHAT they do. A good example is my study of Marcello Garcias armdrags from videos, now it is a bread and butter move of my clinch attacks. I just took the time to watch that clip in slow motion about 50 times before I could see and understand the details of how he set it up and executed it. I am sure he could teach me tons about armdrags, but he is not really around here so that is not an option :D
And that is another thing. I don't have and never have had an "instructor" to teach me Jiu Jitsu on a daily basis. Maybe that is why this imitation/analysis of others game has come so handy in my own development of my game.
Today, during the Cultural Harbour 2007 event we put out some mats on the Islands Brygge harbour in Copenhagen and rolled for about three hours. The weather was perfect and we got a lot of good sparring with many interested spectators walking by. It was a beautiful place to train and also a great opportunity to hand out some flyers for the gym.
I am going on vacation to Bulgaria soon, and I am gonna miss training a lot. It was great to get three hours of rolling today, especially after watching all the other guys fight yesterday without being able to participate :)
Today, I arranged the 10th Openmat Submission Wrestling tournament here in Denmark. Because it was number ten, I wanted to do something special, so we held it outdoors on the beach. It was super nice weather and a ton of people came by to watch. There was A LOT of very exciting matches and all in all it was a perfect day with beautiful Jiu Jitsu!!
I have today reached the first 50 flighthour mark of my 1000 flighthour project. It has taken me five months to get here, which means that I get about 10 full hours of rolling time a month. I want that number to be a significantly higher in the future, but it is difficult to have time for it all :) With this pace I will be done with the project in in 100 months, which is equivalent to 8,33 years. I was hoping that it could be a little faster than that! LOL
Training is going really really great. I feel I am improving for every hour of training and I can definately see that I have improved in every area of my game over the last 50 flighthours. I have especially been working on my wrestling game of clinch and takedowns.
Lately I have gotten a big interest in the takedowns and setups from Freestyle Wrestling. Ken's classes started the interest and now I am reading books and watching instructionals to learn more. Wrestling is a complex game when you start to understand it, just as Jiu Jitsu is. That, combined with that we have no real tradition for Wrestling here in Scandinavia (Greco is a very small sport here and Freestyle virtually does not exist), makes it feel like I am exploring all new territory, which is super cool.
You often hear that a persons ability to fight on his feet are only as good as his ability to keep the fight on his feet. The same must be true the other way around. My ability to fight on the ground is only as good as my ability to take the fight to the ground.
I find that the big difference between Wrestling and Jiu Jitsu, is that you can never really rest when clinching. There are no positions, where you can just hold your opponent for a moment, whilst you take your time to breathe and relax. It is all about attacking and exploding all the time, which transcents really well with my little project of developing a more agressive game.
Today and yesterday, I have done around 2 hours of clinch and takedown sparring only and I am really starting to hit those moves again and again under full resistance. Awesome!
Here is a video that Ken have put together with some wrestling for zhoozhitzu (yes I know, I need to make my own LOL):
*** On another (BJJ-)note, I have a ton of material that I want to share on this blog, but my videocamera is no longer with me, which makes it a little difficult. I can use Ken's though, but that takes planning ;) But anyway, you can expect some new material from me here real soon, so keep checking back :)
Here is a video clip of my friend and employee Ken Allen fighting at the Danish Open Submission Wrestling tournament a few weeks ago. I met Ken in Portland, OR back in 2003 when I was there to train, and about a year ago, we invited him to come to Denmark and teach in our gym. He has taught me and everyone else in the gym tons of stuff and the level of the entire team has been raised significantly with his inputs and teachings here. We are very happy to have him as a part of CSA.
I tried to post this on the SBG members and MMA.tv forum, but it got deleted, so i'll post it here instead in hope of reaching out to as many of my friends in the organization as possible :)
***
Dear friends
As some of you may have heard, I have been asked by Matt to leave the SBG. It would not make sense to start a discussion about why here, nor beginning to list or explain reasons. To make a long story short, me and Matt have had some cooporational and financial issues to deal with over the last approx. 6 months and still going.
Throughout the years, I have met so many cool and fantastic people through the SBG. A lot of them have become very good and close friends of mine, and I wouldn't leave them for the world. The fact that I no longer have an SBG logo on the door to my gym won't change a thing. I will still travel, meet, train, share and hang out with as many of you as I can. I will keep training, teaching and exploring the beautiful sports of BJJ and MMA together with my training partners, students and friends in my own gym, city and around the world. I have many projects going on with grappling tournaments, mma tournaments, teaching, seminars and other events, so don't worry that I am gonna be bored ;)
I am planning to keep my acceptance of my invitation to come to the SBG Euro camp in Sweden together with my friend Ken Allen to teach and train, so if you are coming, I will see you there.
Needless to say, anyone who would ever want to come and train in our gym in beautiful Copenhagen are ofcourse always welcome, regardless. Come see my country any day, there is always room on my couch and in my gym for anyone who feels like stopping by.
If anyone should have an interest in hearing my side of this story in more specific details, you are always welcome to email/call/msn/travel to me and hear all of it. I have nothing to hide, but it would be pointless to write it all here :)
Best regards and with all the best wishes for the future to all of you,
Christian "Using No Way As Way" Graugart CSA Copenhagen www.csa.dk -o- www.shogunhq.com
I just read Aesopian's latest post on his blog, How much do you really need, and found that I have come to the same point in my training at the moment.
I have really not been working on a lot of new stuff the last two months or so, but instead my focus has been on getting to roll as much as possible and refining / getting a deeper understanding of what I already know and do.
That is the main reason, why I have not posted much in here lately. I simply have not been working on coming up with a lot of new stuff to "show", but just putting my focus in getting as many flighthours as possible. And I have gotten quite a few.
Funny enough, all this rolling and investegating what I already know have led me to some pretty cool stuff, that I want to share here when I get the time to shoot some video of it. Here is what have been my focus lately when rolling:
Baseball choke, setups and variations
Front flip for guardpass and takedowns
Upper body weightplacement for faster and smoother leg movement
D'arce choke from sidecontrol bottom
Finishing the single / low single
Headtriangle setup for stiffarm escape
Flying triangle guardpass
I hope to cover all of these subjects here in the blog in the near future, but for now I really just want to roll, roll, roll and roll some more :)
So instead of posting some new fancy tutorial here, I have shot a little video of myself doing some light sparring in the gym. My training partners vary from white through purple belts and MMA fighters to kids, beginners and weightlifters. My MMA is getting pretty sloppy and I don't train it very often, but I did some sparring lately as some of the guys were fighting so I threw it in there on the video as well. It is pretty long (30+ minutes) and I don't expect you to watch it all, I really mostly put it up here so I can track my own progression in my game along the way :)
I will try to make many more of these videos as I slowly progress through project 1000 flighthours. 969 hours left!!
Man, the last month has been crazy. I have had so much work because I have been promoting my first big event, which was held here in Copenhagen May 5th. I am sorry for not posting here, but I simply haven't had the time. I even had to skip training in the weeks up to the event (and then you know I am not lying about being busy :-D). You can check out the event on www.adrenalinesports.dk.
The show went great, there was 31 awesome fights in many different styles. I think it was very exciting and I was very pleased with the final result. We are going to make a new show some time im the fall, but first I have to relax a bit and focus on all the stuff that have piled up during the last month, this blog included :)
I have been rolling a little the last month and the project 1000 flighthours is halfway to the first 50 hours. I can see that I have improved immensely since I started the project, but I will wait with the evaluation untill I have reached 50 hours of rolltime.
So, Rigan was here this weekend and did a seminar in my gym. It was really good, I caught some good details and I really liked his approach to Jiu Jitsu. I took a private with him today to steal some of his topgame secrets and he also showed me some good tips on escaping from bottom. I got a chance to roll with him a little and as expected, he completely CRUSHED me, I couldn't move an inch. Pretty cool experience, kind of brings back the "magic"... the feeling that some people are just so good at this stuff and that there is still sooo much to learn. Great inspiration.
We trained almost five hours both saturday and sunday so I am really tired now, but I still have a long day of training in front of me tonight... another five hours to be exact :)
Rigan just left for a few days for Amsterdam and then he will go to Sweden for a seminar there, before going home to California.
This weekend, Rigan Machado is coming to my gym to teach a seminar. I am really looking forward to train with him and hopefully get some inspiration for my game. Maybe I'll even invest a little money in an hour of private lesson with him, I'll be sure to post all about it here :)
Training is going great, I am getting a lot of rolltime and working hard on being more aggressive. Damn it is hard on my body, I wake up every morning and is sore all over. Hopefully I will get used to it soon. I will film some of my rolls soon and put them up here, then I can look back later in the 1000 flighthours project and see how it looked earlier :)
I have taken a decision to change my style of grappling. For many years, I have played a really lazy game that was mostly build on waiting, relaxing and waiting for my opponent to make mistakes that I could take advantage of. Great style for me, because it is highly technical and doesn't demand too much of endurance or strength to be effective. However, now when many of my training partners get really good and start to match me technically plus get to know my game, they rarely make mistakes for me to exploit anymore. So if I have a day where I relax a little too much, I can get completely run over by some of these guys. And that is a beautiful thing, because it has led me to the decision, that I will try to change my style for a while.
Instead of the lazy game, I will try to be more aggresive in attacking and setting up my opponent to my advantage. I don't want to lay still and wait, but instead I will try to attack again and again, constantly putting pressure on my training partners.
I have been playing this game for about a week and a half now and it is doing a big difference. Ofcourse, I do it mostly with people who challenge me technically or athletically - beginners I still go nice and slow with, no idea in just smashing them :D
One thing I have realized though, is how much tougher this game is for my body. I am SO sore after training now. Probably also because I have had a month off training, but training with this intensity really burns me out. I need more sleep and more+better food to play this game. It is hard, but also a lot of fun. For instance, this attacking game has led me to experiment with the flying triangle guard pass. Really takes some commitment to do it, but it is awesome when it works. Caught it five times in sparring last week, VERY NIAAAICE!!
Project 1000 flighthours down by two hours this week :)
Ok, so I ended up training for five hours yesterday and when I woke up this morning I felt like I would never be able to get out of the bed. Every muscle in my body hurts, I feel sooo busted right now. Had to skip all weightlifting today, but I'll get back to that later in the week :)
Here are two very inspiring clips I found, awesome flow... enjoy:
YES! Finally I can roll again! I started out doing just a little guard work and standup some days ago, and today I turned up the intensity and rolled almost 100%. For some strange reason, after training today, my knee felt completely drained for liquid. Like it just disappeared during training. AWESOME!!!
During the last few weeks, I have just been lifting a lot of weights, which has been really boring. Last saturday, we had two guys from the gym fighting amateur MMA for the first time. It went great, one win and one loss. Here is one of the fights with Nicolas from the gym:
Most people think of our gym as a grappling school, so it is pretty cool to show up at MMA tournaments and hit people in the face instead... just as a surprise :D
I am so excited over the rolling today, it was such a relief to be able to work on the mat again. I was wearing a big smile for the entire evening of training.
I have now added the first mileage to my 1000 flighthours project. Total of five hours of sparring over the last few days. 995 hours to go!! :)
I am getting really desperate to train now, I can do absolutely nothing with this stupid knee :( All I do is hang out in the gym and lift weights, which bores me like hell.
So I have been thinking about a little project for myself I want to launch, when my knee is good again... "Project 1000 flighthours". I want to roll for 1000 hours and see what happens. I have no idea how long it is gonna take, but I am willing to give it a try. A year? Two years? Ten years? I am in the gym every day anyway, so I can always ask my friends if they wanna come by and roll a little. I think it is gonna be an exciting project and a lot of hard work.
I will use this blog to keep track of the hours and then evaluate when I one day finish it. I am eager to see how far I can go in 1000 hours of rolling.
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