It has been nearly 4 weeks since the last time I was able to attend a BJJ session back in Auckland and it feels like forever seen I have been able to train properly. It seems so strange coming down from training BJJ twice a day in Thailand to twice a month in New Zealand, however it has been difficult to fit it all into a travelling schedule since I happen to miss when the sessions are on in the various places I go or they turn out to be to far from the centre of town for me to be able to reasonably get to them.

As it happens though the stars have aligned to give me a chance to head to a session at the Fight Club in Nelson with the guys from the Marcelo Lopes team. I really appreciate everyone not minding me join in as the random new guy who didn’t happen to have a Gi with him during a Gi training session but they made me feel welcome all the same. I can tell straight away that I have forgotten a lot of things from not training for a while and I think I might have to figure out a way for me to at least train some positions and movements by myself to try and keep the mental edge and know what I am doing whenever I do get to fight but I am sure I will figure it out somewhere along the way. As soon as I stop moving for a while and get my bearings I am sure that I will then be able to attend a class more often I just hope it is somewhere that has a decent amount of sessions per week that I can get my teeth into and get back to the amounts of training that I was doing before as I do feel I was making some real progress.

The session we had was working on some basic guard passes which I already knew, however there were quite a few newcomers to the class so it was really important that they get this down and get the concepts into their heads. I was paired with one of the guys who had only been going a few weeks who was roughly my size to go through everything. At first he was struggling with some of the stuff since although the coach was showing solid techniques, some things just don’t work for different body types and the pass that he was trying to do would never really work for him properly and wouldn’t help him get past me in any way. Tweaking this and showing him the way I do it seemed to help and we did get there in the end.

I know I am still a white belt and I know I still have a very long way to go before I get to a decent level, but I would certainly love to get to a point in my life where I am a decent grade and can start teaching people BJJ myself and getting more and more people into it. I am sure I will need to do much more reasearch first and train much harder and more often (as long as I can drag in a partner) but I am certainly willing to put in the time to learn what I need to move forwards. Who knows, one day it might be me with the black belt taking the class and running the drills.

Thank you again to the Nelson Marcelo Lopes BJJ team for their hospitality and I hope to see you all again some time for another round.