Stethoscopes and Armbars: Saulo and Xande Seminar

And it was awesome! We spent 3 hours training with two of the very best jiu jitsu guys - I may be biased but I would say THE best - in the world. The class started with a little bit about the RJJA philosophy and its birth here in the Midwest. We then did the longest warmup of my life – 50 minutes of Ginastica Natural. It’s all about movement and its usefulness in BJJ, which is true. But let me tell you, the next day I could barely walk because it felt like the equivalent of 300 squats. Xande then taught some techniques that involved holding onto the collar, and I got to work with a truly great female blue belt! I really think that that one simple thing will help me out of a lot of bad situations. Then Saulo worked on guard passes and tweaked a few things that I was doing wrong (I’m excited to see how much better they work now). The whole time they were taping what they were teaching for BJJ Library, which was cool! Because you know what you’re watching actually works and you can see how they teach it to a group (of mostly blue belts). Then we did a drill (not sure if you would call it a drill or a game or a challenge or what) where half the people played open guard and half the people had to do the 4 passes as quickly yet effectively as they could to everyone playing guard. I think that ended up being about 11 people so you had to do 44 guard passes in about 6 minutes. It was actually really fun! Until my team lost and we had to do pushups – that was not so fun. We ended the night with everyone having a chance to grapple with Xande until he submitted you. My goal was to last 20 seconds. I think I may have lasted 40 before getting triangle choked. I HAVE to remember both arms in or both arms out. Either way – I got to train with XANDE how cool is that?!