So I’ve been saying for weeks now that I wanted to get together with Rob and work through some of the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu stuff, we’ve just never gotten around to it until now. He came over and we went through all the techniques in the first section of his GJJ manual. Well, not all the techniques. A couple of them were things like sidekicks that we’re intimately familiar with already, or things that we’ve learned in kung fu to do in a different manner, like blocking a punch.

We worked for an hour and a half or so, and aside from some nasty rugburn, it was a blast. The techniques are really fun and you can instantly tell when you’re doing it right. If it’s wrong, your partner just kinda sits there. If it’s right, it doesn’t matter what he does, because you’re gonna pull it off. I’ve watched some of the Gracie videos but until you actually work the techniques, you don’t understand how solid they are. You see these guys doing takedowns and hip throws and it looks really impressive, but until you flip somebody over your hip and take them to the floor, you just don’t grasp how strong the technique is.

We did some takedowns and throws, escapes from the mount and from the guard, some headlock escapes, some submissions, a buncha stuff. We didn’t get to do any sparring or anything, but considering the carpetburn, that’s probably for the best. Hopefully we’ll do some next time.