GOOOOAAALLL!!

I'm pretty stoked tonight because I was able to put a check next to one of my goals.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, last week I wrote a post about setting goals to improve your Jiu Jitsu game.  My first goal that I set was to survive 5 minutes in a leg war roll with a guy that is one the best leg lock guys at my gym.  I was actually able to "one up" that.

I rolled with this guy and not only was I able to survive and not get leg locked, I actually ended up coming out of it with a full mount on him.  I didn't counter or submit him, but my goal was to survive and I actually did more than that.  Now,  he tapped me 3 consecutive times right before that, but like I said, I learn how to defend submissions by getting tapped, analyzing, getting tapped, analyzing, getting tapped, and then analyzing. 

Also, tonight I rolled with another one of our resident leg snatchers, who is a brown belt.  He did catch me in a toe hold once buuuut.... tap, analyze, tap, analyze.... the second time around he went for a quick succession of heal hook variations and I was able to fend them all off and secure the superior position.  I'm pretty exited that I reached one of my goals.  Ze Mario was right, achieving goals does give you a confidence boost in your game. Again, if you don't understand the reference go the post that I linked above.

Another thing that I was able to prove to myself tonight was that when you suck at something, just keep doing it.  Keep showing up every day and eventually you quit sucking. 

Okay well thanks for reading everyone,

Nick

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Sick Days

Well, I'm sick.  I guess it was just meant for me to be off of the mats for a little while.  I had been grappling with my injured arm a little bit, this looks like God's way of telling  me, "hey slow your sh** down, before I bust your elbow up again."  Sucks not being able to train.  I stopped by the gym today and watched every one else roll.  I can't help but think about how all the guys that I will compete against next month are training right now and getting better while I stay stagnant.

This is why I don't ever take days off for any other reason but illness or injury.  I get sick relatively often, for whatever reason.  In the long run though, everyone will get sick or get injured, but not everyone can say they trained on every holiday, every birth day, and every time there was a big party that they had to miss out on.  That's how I get ahead.  If you train every day that you can train, the days that you can't train will be canceled out. 

I hope this doesn't set me back on reaching my goals that I set a couple posts back.  I think they are still reachable though. I'll just pick up the pace when I get back in a few days. 

Well!  Time to say goodbye to this little shot of NyQuil and pass the out!  I want to include this video that relates to the point I made above.  I've watched it a bunch of times; I used to play this in the beginning of my work outs when I felt super tired.  Take some truth strait from the mouth of Al Pacino!

Thanks for readin' guys,

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Nick

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My Ego | Leg Locks| Jiu Jitsu

So once again I'm humbled by Jiu Jitsu. Any time you let your ego get ahead of you in this sport your bound to get thrown back down to earth real quick. Since my arm is still non-functioning I have been working alot on my leg lock defense, like I have mentioned in previous posts. However, I have had a reality check in the last few days, and it has been frustrating, I have to admit. I have learned a few things though.

I thought I could learn to defend leg locks in a matter of weeks. My progress in this area, however, is coming pretty slowly. What I realized is learning leg locks in Jiu Jitsu is a completely different bread of the sport. It's not like learning one move, its a huge range of moves, and you have to know them all. If you do Jiu Jitsu you are probably thinking that I'm stating the obvious, but like I said I guess I got ahead of myself.

There are so many different intricate positions when it comes to leg locks that there cannot be just one defensive move for every submission type. Every detail, every angle, and every foot position changes the game up. It takes more than just practicing a few escapes, you have to be in the situation in a live senario, learn each detail of the position, and learn how to react to them. A lot of it, I think, is specific to you and the way you grapple, so you have to learn them yourself, through experience. So i think after a week of asking everyone I know for leg lock defense moves and scouring every leg lock video on YouTube, I'm changing my game plan. I'm just going to do leg wars (since I still can't roll) and learn how to defend leg submissions from my own experience. I feel like, I was tought a million ways to defend against a choke, but none of them worked for me, it wasn't until I got choked out 10,000 times that I figured out how to stop it my own way. There's no way around the need for mat time.

Thats the great thing about Jiu Jitsu though, you can spar over and over, loose to your sparring partner, but be able to learn from it and improve the very next day. In boxing, when you do bad in sparring you leave with a massive headache and a need for 2 Aspirin, and 3 days to recover. In Jiu Jitsu, you get tapped, you learn, you go righ back at it. Soooo.... let the tap-out-fest begin. Because I expect to be heel hooked, ankle locked, and kneed barred about 100 times each this week. Time to let that ego go and get back to square one!

This has been a pretty big reminder of what I long road it is to try to master this sport. You hear it all the time though, it's just a matter of time. If I put in the time then I'll get the results. So any ways back to the gym tonight for some leg wars. Over and over and over!


Thank you all for reading,

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Nick

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In a Rut: Jiu Jitsu

Last night I was feeling terrible on the mats.  I was getting smashed by everyone I rolled with.  I was rolling with some pretty good guys, but usually they are people that I can keep up with.  I guess I was just having an off day.  But still, I'm back at it today.  Getting ready to leave the office and go train right now actually.  Jiu Jitsu is full of its ups and downs, trials and errors, triumphs and short comings.  I know, though, that if I keep training, I'll keep getting better. I hope none of you let your bad days keep you down.  Keep pushing and come out on top.


"I fail more than I succeed in life, its my ability to pick my self up and keep going that makes me successful."
- Matador.

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Thanks for reading,

Nick

Cutting Weight for Competition

So with the 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu Tournament coming up, it's time to cut weight.  I've done a good amount of research on weight cutting, also I work part time in the health industry and learn a lot doing that, so I have a pretty good system down to cut weight for tournaments so I wrote an article on ezine a few days back.  I thought I would share the link if any of you guys are looking for a good way to cut.

Check it out here ---------> WEIGHT CUTTING



Hope it helps you guys out.  If you like it, please share it on Facebook! :) thanks guys

Nick

10th planet HQ: Denny Prokopos guillotine

Last night Eddie Bravo invited everyone from 10th Planet Riverside to come down to head quarters and train in Hollywood.  It was a pretty cool experience.  Denny Prokopos was also teaching, and he is a world class teacher.  Man did these guys like to talk though.  Eddie's class was 80% Jiu Jitsu and 20 % stand up comedy.  The guy was freakin' hillarious though.  All in all they were both great teachers.

Denny showed some stuff on the pretzel grip guillotine.  It was pretty cool.  He showed me something that was pretty eye opening.  If you put your hands in a regular guillotine grip,with your choking hand with its palm facing you, and pretend your choking an invisble person, look at the space between your forearm and bicep.

 When you turn your choking hand so its palm is facing away from you, then squeeze the guillotine.  The gap closes.  Pretty interesting stuff.

When you try this grip at first the squeeze takes a lot of effort, it's very uncomfortable.  However, Denny is a pretty nice guy and he gave me some tips on how to practice the squeeze when I am by my self.  Mainly, pretending you thigh is a neck, strap your guillotine around it, and choke out your thigh.  This will help develop your squeeze.  He said, "don't practice to get a tap, practice to put someone to sleep, because if you can hold your squeeze long enough to sleep 'em, you can definately hold it long enough to tap 'em." 

Eddie didn't teach much because Denny was teaching for most of the time, but showed some techniques using Z guard to get the hand to the mat and transition to rubber guard.  It wasn't anything that I hadn't seen before, but it was his attention to detail that impressed me.  From the angles he explained to the various ways to use your wrist control.  The guy really new his stuff. 

After class I said thank you to Eddie and he struck up a conversation with me.  Which, in my experience, is rare for alot of famous Jiu Jitsu guys.  He was an extremely nice dude, super easy to talk to, and really funny.  He ended up inviting me to come back next week and said he would get a roll in with me.  Can't wait to feel what its like to be inside of a real rubber guard.  I hear that his clinch is unbelievable.  I will let you guys know how that goes and hopefully get some videos up here. 

Hope this new guillotine grip helps out your game guys,  thanks for reading.

Nick

natural ability: Jiu Jitsu

The thing i love about Jiu Jitsu is that everyone can do it.  Of course, there are those with severe situations, but no one will be held back in this sport by lack of natural talent, physical strength, speed, or any thing of the sort. Natural ability itself, is a western idea.  In Thailand, the Muay Thai gyms raise fighters from a young age, these kids eat, sleep, train at the gyms.  There is no physical ability test they have to pass, they just have to have to be young enough to be able to put a sufficient amount of time in.  In Jiu Jitsu, even the age hardly comes in to affect.  Thai fighters usually retire by the time they are in their late 20s, due to the physical toll it takes on your body.  In Jui Jitsu this is not the case, at my old gym, there was a brown belt that didn't have a single colored hair left on his head, and he was one of the best guys there.

The point is, all jiu jitsu requires is time.  If you can put the time in, you get the skills.  In a book called Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, it talks about the 10,000 hour rule.  If you put 10,000 hours in to something, no matter what you natural ability level was, you will be a master.  There was a study done in Asia where they looked at the famous musicians playing in the big orchestras.  There was a connection made that showed if the kids growing up practiced 30 hours a week, they would become successful musicians.  There was not a single person who put in 30 hours per week, and just couldn't cut it.  On the other side of that, the study was full of musicians who were brimming with natural talent, and there for practiced less than 30 hours per week, these students grew up to be high school music teachers and other things of the sort.

When Marcelo Garcia started Jiu Jitsu, he lived far from the gym, so he could only train three times per week.  Eventually, he moved in to the gym, and reportedly trained for 4 sessions each day, with the sessions being upwards of an hour.  Marcelo Garcia is now widely considered the best pound-for-pound grappler in the world.  In fact, it was Marcelo Garcia's story that inspired me to commit to Jiu Jitsu and begin living at the gym that I train at.

Never get discouraged when you train.  Do not worry if you have what it takes.  If you have the time to commit, you have what it takes.  Just keep training and keep motivated, and you will reach your goals.  Take it from 78 y/o Gene Pace.  Check out this link to read about how he got his black belt at such an advanced age. 

Commitment

I discovered Jiu Jitsu a little later than some.  I had a brown belt in Karate and found my self in a MMA fight in Kentucky with absolutely no idea what MMA really was.  The extent of my ground game was ground n' pounding a punching bag in my garage for 6 weeks before this fight.  While the fight was close, I lost in a split decision, and it gave me the same wake up call that Royce Gracie gave the world when he won UFC 1 in 1993.  I knew then this was something that I HAD to learn.

To make a long drawn out love story into something short and sweet.  I spent more and more of my time in the gym.  Eventually realizing that this was the life path for me.  I have reached a crossroads in my life and have come to the realization that at age 21 it is time to either take a risky plunge into full time training and accomplish something great, get lost in the seemingly infinite crowd of people trying to find their way through the American education system.

I chose the former.  I had always felt my future laid outside the world of endless 8 hour days, and working simply to make a living.  I wanted something more, and in Jiu Jitsu I had found it; a way to spend my life doing what I love.  In this blog, hope to inspire others to do the same.  To go after what they want and leave behind the limitations of what they think is possible.  To forget the underestimations of themselves and just take a leap of faith.  This is the story of my leap of faith.  This is the live update of what happens to me as I decide not to believe that growing up means making compromises.  This is my journey into the alternate universe that is Jiu Jitsu.

I have quit school, working part time between my training sessions to pay for training and things related to it, and moved in to a small room in the back of the gym.  It's all or nothing.  Let's see how this works out for me.