Training report: Mount position and Inter Club competition

This week, we covered the topic of the mount position.

It is the first position that we teach in the program as it scores the most points: 4 points.

Next week, we will be covering the back position which also scores 4 points.

On Thursday, Stu also covered the competition rules in order to prepare for the inter club which was held at Sandringham.

Buckland Beach BJJ and ETK HQ came and supported our invitational event.

Prior to a NZ grappler competition, we like to prepare ourselves by hosting a little competition 4 weeks before.

it get students in the moods. test some techniques and many of them it was their first opportunity to test their skills.

We made 5 groups of 4 and everyone has a guaranteed 2 matches.

The inter-club competition concluded with an open mats where everyone got to to roll with another 30 minutes.

Thank you for the support.

Please note that we are still taking new members at our Epsom and Sandringham locations.

Congratulations to Andy Medcalf on his black belt promotion

We would like to congratulate Andy on his promotion to black belt by his Professor Raphael Dos
Santos.

Andy is the head coach and owner of Buckland Beach BJJ.

he also runs  fun raising events For Variety The children 's charity.

Well done.


For more information to train at Buckland Beach BJJ, please check out his website.

https://bucklandsbeachbjj.co.nz/

Training report: Questions and Answers

I always love to run the topic of the questions and answers as it concludes the 12 weeks program and

provide me with feedback on how we are doing.

I usually ask the new students to ask questions and attempt to answers them.

Often the questions are related to a week that a student would have missed and we easily cover that again.

It means that it is an opportunity to catch up with information due to a busy schedule.

But also, the questions covers some techniques that are not in our fundamentals.

Which is great because we acknowledge that it is impossible to offer the perfect program.

Maxwell asked about spider guard passes

Jordan asked about side control and knee on the belly escapes.

Davey asked about omoplata sweep and triangle.

We also had the visit from Marcelo on Thursday.

No gi season has started

NZ grappler has confirmed the date of Saturday 13 October for the nogi regional therefore we have
started our nogi season accordingly.

Also we have added our inter club invitational competition to prepare for the regionals on Saturday 15 September.

The invitational event is not to replace or compete with the NZ grappler competition.

It is for our students and a couple of clubs to get together and offer an opportunity to test our skills in a friendly environment.

I think it is ideal for beginners to try out before they can enter the regionals.

We also will have some of our coaches Laurance and Luis to start referring as well.

It is a short 2 hours event from 10 am to 12 am.

We will just create group of 4 people of the nearest weight with a double elimination system with guarantee 2 matches.

We will also seed the matches so you will be matched up with same belt level in your first match.

The event will be hosted at our Sandringham because of the space in terms of 160 sqm of mats but also the car parks and seating arrangement for the spectators.

We are doing nogi on Wednesdays in Sandringham and Tuesdays at Epsom.

We are also organising a pre order for rash guard...more information to follow.

Competition is not everything but...

After the National Gi competition, I did a little speech at both dojos (Epsom & Sandrigham).

The reason for the speech was to acknowledge the need for the club to promote and follow a calender shaped around competition but at the same time explained that competition was not everything in our mind.

At the same time, I hope that it did not belittle the achievement of our competition who achieve 6 medals from 10 competitors (which is an outstanding result by any means).

It make sense to have a specific rules set around what competition rules we are expecting to enter.

So for example, since we enter NZ grappler events which follow SJJF rules currently, we train under these rules.

It would be pointless trying to follow different rules and then having to modify our set of skills for each event.

The competitions available in Auckland are typically a regional nogi and gi and a national gi and nogi which are spread around the year.

Usually it is like 2 events per semesters.

So we put our training around these events and at the same time we create 1 inter club event about 4 weeks before each NZ grappler competition to prepare ourselves accordingly.

So it is like 4 events per semester (2 inter-clubs and 2 NZ grapplers events).

It is plenty action and help create a necessary momentum in the club.

At the same time, I would like to acknowledge that competition is not compulsory or necessary for our students.

In fact, I would say that competitors only makes 20% to 30% of our members and we could not keep the lights on so to speak if we only cater for competitors.

So why do we compete?

It gives us a purpose and help with creating a semester around the events.

Otherwise, rapidly people just keep rolling and just smash each others senseless.

A way to look at it is is guaranteed self destruction without goals outside the club.

So competition makes you think about training to compete and defeat someone else from another team.

But at the same time, you will compete and make friends with other competitors.

So it is not just us versus the world mentality.

For our non-competitors, you still play a major role in our program.

To start with, you drill and roll with our competition team and every rolls counts and I can guarantee that everyone appreciate your participation.

You will get promoted in due time like the rest of the team and I can easily say that I am product of such system.

So basically, while we use competition to create a momentum, the coaching staff does not to estrange the members that are not interested in competing.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a great sport but also is good for self defense, fitness and we also focus a lot on camaderie and friendship.

Thank for the support everyone.