Danish Open Come and Go

Since last time I had went to the European Open in Lisabon and competed in the master black belt division.

I lost my first fight with two points, I made a mistake that cost me the fight. I believe that I could have won it, but I did not. But know I know what not to do.

But it went really well for the club and the team. I think that we got 11 medals total. 3 or 4 gold.
And CheckMat became second in adult and first in master/senior.

It is me standing there with Jacare and Gurgel. It was funny there was no one else at the stadium from CheckMat to receive the trophies, so I had to do it. I think that Jacare and Gurgel, was thinking "who is that guy?".

Right after we got back to Denmark we had a 14 days seminar with Bob Esponja from Brazil, it was really good. Over the two weeks I trained almost every day with Bob. Fantastik Jiu Jitsu.

We also held the 5th Danish Open in BJJ, it was the biggest BJJ event in Danmark ever.

I will write more about this later

Really nice basic technique in this video. Especially the last part I think

$$

Lørdags MMA Basic træning med fight factory hos Arte Suave

Basic MMA Class at the academy

DOUBLE ATTACK ARM BAR WITH DEFENSE

There is snow everywhere in Denmark right now, it is so nice to come down to the academy, where there is alway nice and warm.

The first week of the year has been really good, about 20-25 guys on the mat in the basic classes.

Hard to belive that before we got our own space 10-14 guys in a class, was a lot of people. Now if there is only 18 guys on the mat I start to worry :-)

A snowplow just went by my window.

Things are looking good for the Danish Open BJJ, which is the 20th of February, people are slowly starting to sign up. Hopefully we will get more sign ups then last year. Last year we had to set the limit to 250 competitors, because of lack of space, but this year the limit is at 500. But we will see.

Starting to get into shape for the European championship BJJ in Lisabon this month. Looking forward to. I can feel the training on my body, waking up everyday, and it feels like I have been hit by a truck. I can thank all my training partners for that one :-D

This week we will be training a lot of stand up and attacks and defence from the side control.

All hard work :-)

Some more vidoes

Just some more videos, some really nice passes from BJ and a little video that I made from

our trip to ADCC in Barcelona. Two girls from the club competed in ADCC.

The first pass that is shown in the BJ video is one of my favorites, this works great with gi and in no-gi.

The Championships are getting closer

The European Championships are getting closer, now there is only like 25 days to go. Got to spet up the training.

Going to do alot of stand up sparring up until we leave, lots of drills standing and on the ground.

The next couple of weeks are going to be hard, but looking forward to it.

Going to post some video of our training, just have to film it :-).

OMAPLATA FROM BASIC GUARD

BASIC ARM BAR BJ Penn

Nice basic armbar by BJ Penn

Sunday 22 nov 2009

Woke up this morning felt like I got run over by a truck.

This week we started the preparation for the EU campionships in january. Normally we dont have BJJ on fridays, but now we have a class fridays at 19:00 with the gi.

Can feel the training from friday and saturday. Startede the class with some basic drills and then went into some situation sparring. Saturday some brazilian guys that are currently staying in Malmø, came over to sparre with us. Super cool. But today my body is very tired. Going to the club today at 17 to sparre with them again. Lets see what the body can do today.

Looking forward to see the end result of our training on the team. I think that this is going to make a big difference for the team as a whole. And my own progress.

The standard in the club is getting better and better. This year has been one of the best so far.

Techniques of the Week

I started to do techniques of the weeks videos in danish. If you go to you tube you can find all the techniques that you want, but they are all in english, so we wanted to make some videos on danish, and we got a good response on the video. Right now we have not done more then 5 weeks of techniques.

I have already posted one of the vidoes. If you are interested in the rest of the videos, go and subscribe to the playlist

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=AF08F68AC8A78EAD

We set up a team for the European Open BJJ in jaunuary, this is the first time

that Denmark sends a tema. The last couple of years only more or two fighters

have competed from DK. So 2010 we are sending about 10-14 fighters to the

campionship. And everybody is going to train hard together to get ready.

My arm is a little injured, but I think that it will get ready for hard training in

a week or two.

Not the best blogger in the world

Almost forgot about this blog. Had alot of work with the club.

Since the last post we moved to a new location, a bigger and better place.
We got a much bigger mat space, weights and many other things.

New Belt New Medals

Since the last post we have 4 new belts in the club, the first danish black belt.

I got my black belt as the first home grown danish black belt, I'm very proude to receive my black belt from my teacher Peter Blackwell and Leo vieira, it was a very good day.

The club also got 3 new brown belts, Joachim, Nic and Shanti. All of them have won the mundials. So congratulations to them all.

The final result from this year in medals was better then last year, 83 medals. Last years result was 70.

There are a lot of new up and coming fighters in the club, so the future looks better then ever.

Good weekend for the club

The results of the weekend, we had 5 fighters and won 2 fights. We won the most important fight the title fight for middleweight championship. One of the worst knock outs I have seen. High Kick to the face. The other guy was out cold.

There was some really bad decisions buy the refs. One fight that should have been a draw and one where two of the refs had it as a draw, but I cant see have that could ever have been a draw. Hopefully the next time they will have some better refs that know what they are doing.

Other then that it is going really well with the club the basic class is growing and more and more people are calling or sending mails. My gole for this year is that we have 100 students. And we are on our way. More and more people are interested in BJJ, SW and MMA.

Today I went to Malmø to train with my trainer, some good sparring, the things that I'm working on now was working good for me. I'm trying to take the back and working on the half guard. Trying to set up the back and different sweeps. This works well for me in the club, but that doesent say much, since I'm the only brown belt and most of the students are blue and white belts. I still have problems doing the stuff on the other purple belts. But it was nice to feel that I'm not totally off.

Two new Purple belts in the club

Last night we had a seminar in the club with our black belt Peter Blackwell.

At the begining of the seminar we gave out two new belts, one to Ida how won the Copa do Mundo and the European Championships as a blue belt. And to Rune that got two silver medals at the Master & Senior this year. Both well deserved. I think that we were about 25 people, this is a lot for our club. Peter showed some really nice takedowns, all from the same grib.

We just received a complaint about the smell from our club :-). guess that they are not used to the smell of sweaty kimonos. Hopefully we can get to an agreement with the other people in the building. But sounds like they are not that happy with us. Would be really bad if we had to find a new place. In Copenhagen it hard to rent a place where you can have a martial arts club.

The training is going really well in the club, a lot of people at every class. And signups every week. This saturday 5 guys from the club is competing in a danish MMA event Adrenaline. Looking forward to it. All the guys look ready to go.

A new highlight from this years Master & Senior.



It is a little dark, but I think that it is ok.

Did some squat, deadlift and overhead press this morning, it really helps with my back and neck. I dont get so tired in the lower back. And I can feel that it thigtens up in the upper back/neck. I had a lot of problems with my neck. Just got over some seriouse problems with the left side of my neck and shoulder. Couldn't train for 2-3 months, and lost a lot of strength in the left side of my body. It is still not back to normal, but much better. There are things that I should not do. That is the problem with getting older. Injuries just takes so much longer :-(
But I'm back rolling on the mats, the standup I'm still taking it easy with.

Danish ADCC

Just finished uploading all the videos from the first Danish ADCC Event. It took me awhile compressing and adding the ADCC logo to all the vidoes, but now it is finally done. If you want you can watch them all at adcc.dk

There is some good fights in there, the girls -60 kg is a good fight between Shanti and Camilla.

I'm running a club with 3 others guys in Copenhagen, this year we finally got our own place, so now we can plan all the classes without having to consult anybody, and we dont have to fight for the best time slots. This makes a big difference, now we have 3-4 times as many classes a week. Before we had a problem finding time for beginners classes in BJJ and MMA. And now that we have them, we get new students every week. This did not happen before. Another factore I think is also the results that we have produced this year. At the European, World championships and the Internation Master and Senior we got 10 medals total, divided on 7 people. By far the best results for any club in Denmark.

The next big event for the club is Adrenaline 3, a danish MMA event. We have 5 guys competing in the event, one of them a title fight. If we win this we have two of the Adrenaline title belts at the club.

We are trying to get as many people to come with us to Scandinavien Open in BJJ in Stockholm, it is usually held in Malmø, whitch is close to Copenhagen. Last year we did really well, I think that we where the best club, with 11 medals. But now it is going to be harder for people to go. But hopefully we can repeate the succes from last year. For me it payed some of my ticket to Brazil, so that I could compete in the Internation Master & Senior, because I won the Brown Belt Open Class, and got a gift certifikat to a travel agency :-).

Next wednesday Peter Blackwell, my teahcer is coming over to give a seminar at the club, lets see if there is any changes in the color of the belts in the club.
There are some guys that are on the tipping point for the blue belt, I have to check up on them this week. But I reather be sure that they are ready, then to give out the belst to fast. In the club it is not easy to get the blue, purple or brown belt, we dont have any black belts yet. People have to work hard to get to the next level. But on the other hand, when you get your belt you know that you deserve it.

Training from Rio

Training hard

Started to lift weights again, have not done that in a long time, last time I seriousely did that was when I was 19 years old, and that is a long time ago.
But this time it is different, when I was young I wanted to get big, but now I want functional strength, for grappling.
So I'm not wroking so much on the cheast, but more on the core. Deadlift, squad and so on.
The strange things is that I get so tired after a workout, that I almost fall asleep, writing this. :-)

When I train bjj I get tired, but that doesn't last that long, after awhile I get my energy back again.

At the moment I'm working on my passing game, trying to stay out of the half guard, either by crossing the knee or pushing myself back so he can't get my leg up on the shoulder. It is starting to work out really well for me. I will try to film my sparring sessions this week.
I have a youtube account with me sparring with different people.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=SparringProgression

But lately I have not filmed so much, but I will start it up again, the original plan was to film every two weeks or monthly. But it has been 14 months since I put something up. I have some video from Rio that I plan to put up there.

I think that video is very underrated as a training tool, for many people.

I was looking at some of the blue belts sparring and it made me very happy to see how much they have developed their skills. Looks good for the future.

Danish ADCC

This weekend the first danish ADCC event was held in Hillerød, a city 30 min from Copenhagen by car. The event did not see that many fighters, for different reasons, I think that many people in the danish grappling community was afriad that the level of the competition was going to be to high, because it was ADCC. But the next event in decmeber will see a lot more fighters. This is going to be the Danish nationals.

There was some good fights, all the fights will be put up on the homepage adcc.dk.

Yesterday I went to Malmø, Sweden, to help out Bobby Sundel with a photo shoot for the Swedish fighter mag. It was a technique series. It was good fun and hopefully it will turn out great.

Started to do deadlift, squad, benchpress and shoulder press, in the crossfit gym that is housed in the same building as our gym. Erik a bjj student and instructor in crossfit show us how to preform the different filt the correct way. Very nice, but I can feel it in the body.

This week the new passing game that Richardinho showed us, I will try to introduce as a drill that I will use as a warmup drill. So that people will get more comfetaple with it, and the moves will come more natural then now. It is really nice to see people do the moves in the sparring.

And I will slowly put in more moves from the half guard.

First Kids class

We had our first kids bjj class yesterday. 3 kids showed up, from 5-7 years of age.
Hopefully we can build up a big class and future competitors for the club :-D.
This is the way for the future of bjj in Denmark, because at the moment it a small sport, with about less then 10 clubs. BJJ has only been in the country for about 7 years.


Wednesday I went to Sweden with Shanti to train with my coach Peter Blackwell, good sparring. There was not that many of the higher levels at the training, but it was good anyway. After an hour or more of sparring, I had to get back to the club in Copenhagen to teach for 3 hours. I no problem sleeping that night.

Yesterday I met up at the club with some of the guys, to practice some of the new techniques that we got from the trip to Rio. Really nice to go over the stuff again and again, so that we can get some more flow and slowly get it integrated into my game.

Started this morning with some push press and squat, just training the proper techniques, down in the crossfit gym, that is in the same build.

Coming up next week is the first danish adcc event, but not that many people have signed up yet. Hopefully more will come.