Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Thread: Newaza! - Page 2

not if your fighting with suits on! think about how fast you can choke out some douche in a rubbanici suit and have confidence that the stitching is strong enough to handle the torque and pull while he loses consciousness. it works the other way too... you can use you're anderson and sheppard suit's superior strength stitches against your combatant.

Any good grappler will tell you the "gi" is mandatory to learn. You need both gi and no gi training and I hate the gi but I do understand that it's important so I suck it up.

Any dc area people come check out our gym 50/50 BJJ.

I teach mauy thai there and Ryan Hall is our Bjj guy.

I have played judo for almost three years. I'm only a yonkyu. A few of our club members cross train BJJ or come from BJJ to judo. I've competed a couple of times, but it's hard in the over 35 division being so new. They hardly have any competitors so I could get my @ss handed to me in a higher belt level master's division or against much younger, more fit guys in the senior division many of whom are just out of college wrestling programs. I like the fact that we have throws as well as newaza and prefer that we don't have leg locks. The pain seems to come on as the snap occurs on the legs, whearas for the elbows there's a lot more time to tap.

Does anyone here train at the downtown NYC Gracie gym? I am going to have some downtime during a job-change and was thinking about some classes.

I need to talk to you Mauro. One of our guys has real potential, He has been practicing since he was 16, and now, at 20, is a 3 stripe purple belt who regularly pwns purple and brown belts in competition. Last time, he tapped out 2 purple belts in under 10 minutes. The first guy he had locked into the spiderweb and finished in 35 minutes. Would have been shorter under no-gi submission wrestling rules. Anyway, he has been watching and learning a lot of the Ryan Hall stuff, already has a great triangle, and would probably benefit from training at 50/50.

Anyway, I've been practicing BJJ and submissions wrestling since 2000. I stumbled on a John Machado school purely by mistake. I was there for a year or so before I decided that MMA was more interesting to me (my background was in American style kickboxing,) but I didn't know how good I had it (both in BJJ and MMA) until I left LA, and I regret not learning more there.

After a long (5 year) lay off of MMA and BJJ, I took it up again a couple of years ago. I'm 36 now, my ground game was never my strong suit, and out here in Idaho, I'm definitely one of the smaller guys, so it's always a humbling experience to have bigger, younger guys or a very competitive ex-Ranger crushing you. But I really like it, and have actually had to work out a lot of the kinks I used to compensate for with muscle and youth.

Gi training is really important, imo. There are mixed opinions in the BJJ/submission wrestling community. For example. Eddie Bravo really doesn't like the gi (and he is a JJ Machado blackbelt, so he has excellent traditional pedigree), but the guys at BJJ University in San Diego swear by it. There are definitely differences. For example, when you are using the gi, double unders are the way to go if you've taken someone's back, but the MMA over/under is used when you are rolling with no-gi. Or, there are X-guard things that work much better if you can grab your opponent's pant leg. Or if you want to use the Mario Sperry guard pass, having the gi for leverage is really useful. And that's not to even mention things like lapel chokes. I think that wearing a gi really makes you work harder at certain aspects of technique, and paradoxically, makes you develop your conditioning better for certain escapes. No-gi, of course, really makes you work hard at a lot of things too.

I hate the gi too, mainly because my experience with submission wrestling is so much more extensive, and I am pretty susceptible to things like the Ezekiel choke and different collar chokes.

Going on 11 years of grappling now. Dabbled with bjj here and there, but vast majority of my training has been judo. Groundwork is good, but I can't shake my love of tachi waza, hence my love of judo

This makes me respect you even more
As to the gi vs no-gi debate, I think gi training prepares you for street defense during the winter season while no-gi is for summer street defense.

I don't have a lot of experience with MMA, but I've done enough no gi jiu-jitsu to avoid making any major stupid mistakes. My first time doing judo I ended up rolling with a guy who had a few years of experience in bjj. I ended up in all sorts of collar chokes, and something that involved him grabbing my gi on either side of my bicep and pushing his knee down as hard as he could.

I've got mad respect for gi work even if only on the basis of adding yet another dimension to the already incredibly involving art of grappling.

Damn that's cool Mauro, I didn't know you teach muay thai. Ryan Hall is a sick grappler. All of Lloyd Irvin's guys are good. Hgalek, that sounds like he was maybe doing a bicep slicer. I've trained in grappling for about 4 years and am a purple belt although I haven't put on a gi in over a year. Been concentrating on MMA.

Completely illegal in competition, but fun.

It's a lot of years to suck, unfortunately. I think that my ground game has improved about as much as Houston Alexanders's or Cheick Kongo's.

Gi is actually probably better training for summer. My competition gi has a super thick collar which is hard to use as a weapon. On the other hand, a tee-shirt is essentially a garrote.

For some reason some tournament allowed it in my area (some no gi tournaments allow heel hooks, I think it was one of these) and some dude got his forearm broken with a slicer. Hearing the pop was sickening.

I like heelhooks, and the Machados like them. but they are pretty dangerous. Of course, I liked to do neck cranks and spinal cranks and compressions in MMA competition, so I dunno why I'm advocating for safe submissions.