Yeah its the gentle art, but not THAT gentle

I didn't manage to medal this weekend at the English Open, but I did get lots of good feedback on my game, attitude and fitness.

A while ago one of my training team mates mentioned that i should get more aggressive and explosive during the stand up/wrestling phase. Nonsense I said, you get injured or injure others like that, lets play nice and gentle and tie up with grips in a civilised manner before gently taking each other down...

Well guess what he was right, I was way too passive in the stand up portion of my matches. First match I go for a really sloppy shot ( if you can even call it that) ...and end up getting put in an anaconda choke! I don't know what I was thinking guess I thought he would just let me take him down or something.

The same match turned out to be the highlight of my tourney  though as I managed to survive the choke, get out and then win by baseball choke from knee ride! I felt pretty proud about sticking it out and then having the wherewithal to win. 


(By the way I'm the dude with the caterpillar stuck under his nose in the video below. Thank God Movember is nearly over!)

Ended up fighting the same guy in the bronze medal match and it was a back and forth war (at least that's what it felt like to me). Nearly got that knee ride and collar grips a few times but he could see it coming so he made sure never to let me get comfy and my opponent won on points when the time was up. Hopefully will get to fight him again at a tourney soon, great opponent and good sport too!

I cut about 7kgs over a couple of months for this tournament, and was still not eating much or doing a lot of conditioning outside of bjj ahead of the tourney. Now the task is to settle into my weight, (or maybe loose a little more so I'm comfortable making weight next time) and get back into conditioning.

And finally congratulations to all my team-mates, who put up a fantastic fight that weekend! And thanks to the guys at Carlson Gracie Team for running a really sharp tournament, pretty much all the brackets started on time, which in my experience is pretty rare.