Good Afternoon All, Back here in New England after spending a week at Martial Arts Studies Conference 2024 in Cardiff, UK. The conference was exceptional, but more on that later. For now, I’ll highlight one of the many outstanding encounters of the trip. I had the distinct pleasure this past week of meeting and sitting down with…
Tossing an opponent like a salad. Pulling off a sweep in ground fighting is an exhilarating moment that fills us with monumental sense of victory. What comes next? These powerful moves are fundamental to our jiu-jitsu arsenal, yet are so often applied at the wrong time, or wrong place. In this course I’ll give you the tools to not only train your sweeps on your own, or with a partner, but how to successfully pull them off in live rolling.
I recently had the privilege to be invited on Jerry’s new podcast - Fight Commentary Chats. Some of you may have come across Jerry already in your YouTube travels…
Have you ever wanted to try one of the amazing submissions or sweeps from Brazilian jiu-jitsu and instead, spent the entire class stuck in guard? Do you find it impossible to pass guard because you cannot even break the guard in the first place? Do you routinely break guard on people your own size, only to be shutdown and back to square one against a larger opponent?
I had the great pleasure of returning once more as a guest on Sensei Ando’s channel Happy Life Martial Arts. We had an amazing, and thought provoking discussion on martial arts forms training, solo training, and more. We even threw some virtual punches, and a shadow Heimlich maneuver was almost necessary. Check out the video for a great podcast.
These times require us to innovate and adapt to the changes in our lives, routines, and day to day activities. For weeks many of us have been without a class to attend. The good news? We can still train martial arts without a class or partners, and continue to develop our skills and improve.
What does it take to make this happen? You can watch this video I made this week telling a story on why I had to learn to train myself in martial arts, or you can skip below and jump to the bullet points so you don’t have to wait any longer to train.
Either way, rest assured
The hip toss, and its variations such as 'overturn the sack', and 'old man carries fish', are awesome and devastating throws. However, there are complications for these throws when applied outside of competitions where weight classes keep opponents generally closer in size to one another. Depending on your size, the hand position, and the choice between using the tiger tail throw instead of hip toss can mean all the difference in success rather than failure.
As I’m sure some of you can understand, the idea of having to work closely with someone else, especially on the ground, used to 'skeeve me out'. There is a stark differential between what I was accustomed to - striking, kicking, and takedowns, in contrast to rolling around on the ground with another human being while wearing pajamas, or skin tight clothing. In the world of hindsight is 20/20…
Here's one of my favorite closed guard breaks, and why it is horrible for taller vs. smaller. If you do use this BJJ escape, here is the answer to 'why isn't my closed guard break working?' Enjoy this next installments in our Size Matters series. This is a must see if you are trying to break a smaller grapplers closed guard.
This podcast is a re-recording of a talk I gave at the 5th Annual Martial Arts Studies Conference held at Chapman University in Los Angeles, California in May 2019. The event was hosted by Dr. Paul Bowman, and Dr. Andrea Molle. A two day extravaganza of martial arts history, politics, and culture. There is amazing research into the martial arts taking place around the globe today. It was an honor to be a part of this significant event, and contribute in some small way to the Martial Arts Research Network. Below is a copy of the…
