CSA BJJ and MMA Camp report

Almost three weeks ago me and a buddy of mine attended the CSA.dk BJJ and MMA Camp in Copenhagen for 5 days. We also met there with two friends of mine from Finland and I want to thank them for the nice time we spend there.

The main trainer was Christian Graugart also well known in the BJJ Community as the BJJ Globetrotter who also recently published his book in a Kindle and Print version. I allready bought myself the Kindle version and read through the first 100 pages. What I can say so far is, that it is well worth the read and a must for every BJJ and Grappling enthusiast. From my point of view there are not enough books like that, that not only focus on techniques but also display a little bit the lifestyle of BJJ and Grappling. One other which comes into mind, in this segment is the "Cauliflower Chronicles" of which I wrote in previous posts on this blog.

So back to the camp itself, me an my buddy arrived on Wednesday in the morning right before the training started of. On Wednesday the training was done by Robson Barbossa a Black Belt from Checkmate who lives in Sweden, who is also the one who gave Christian his black belt. On this day there were four 1,5 hour sessions on the plan with Robson, I ended up doing three of them as I was a bit tired in the afternoon due to the fact that I had to get up at four in the morning. Further more, the training was pretty brutal and consisted almost only of sparring in various forms. We did a lot of guard passes and what was funny, that Robson represented exactly the checkmate mind set, which is, never pull guard or even go to full guard yourself…

On the next day, we started out with a de la riva sweep session which was one of the topics that I asked for, so I was pretty pumped. Christian showed us the basic application of the De la riva Guard and some sweeps that work for him. After midday, we did the Stiff arm escape, which is a pretty nice move to get some off you when get your guard passed and your opponent lands in side control. It looks pretty simple but is damn effective. The nice thing is, that yesterday, I was able to apply the stiff arm escape as well as a de la riva sweep in no-gi sparring at my home Dojo which is the Enomoto Dojo of Yasubey and Felipe Enomoto. The third session of the day was the guard passing session, we drilled basically two open guard passes when you are standing yourself. I have to admit, that the trainings were a little bit easier than the ones from Robson and I was quite happy about that fact as otherwise my body wouldnt been able to coop with the massive amount of training. I also decided not to attend the sparring sessions and only go for the open mat on Friday as I wanted to safe my energy for the actual trainings. In the evening there was one more class, which was the no-gi guillotine held by Kari Gunnarsson a brown belt of Christian. I only set on the side and watched this class…

On Friday we started out with a spider guard class, also a topic which was on my wish list. Christian also showed us there the basic applications and little hints on how apply your foods properly, than we were going over some basic sweeps and a transition to the omoplata. After this session there was only one more which was the Open Mat. Due to the fact, that the Swedish Open were just around the corner the mat was packed with students from various academies which led to a proper sparring session.

On Saturday there was a little competition to be held for the guys from CSA and the participants of the camp. As soon as the brackets were released I knew how this was going to play out as I was matched up with some tough tough white belts from Moldavia. I was pretty certain, that this two guys were going to get there blue belts on this day and as I sparred with them before I knew my chances were slim to none to submit these guys. I didn't know the fourth guy in my bracket and I set my goal to win against this dude and make the third place an gather my first medal. As you can see in the picture below it worked out as planned and I submitted the buy via Kimura from guard…

In the afternoon Christian took us out to visit Copenhagen and showed us around town. Although the weather was a little depressing as most of the time over there I found Copenhagen to be a nice little town ;)

In the evening we met up to go for a all you can eat Spareribs session which ended in having some drinks in various bars around town. I don't know why, but I think my last beer was old or something as I had severe headache in the morning, but I was sure it didn't came from to much drinking…

On Sunday there was only one more session which was called "Fancy shit" and Christian showed us some nice little moves and so the camp ended and me and Lukas went back home to Switzerland. All in all the camp was pretty great and Christian is a real good teacher, he told me one interesting thing about my game after we rolled with each other. He told me, that I need to relax a little more and don't be to serious and always think about that I want to win and nothing else. Certainly he was right, as I was not gonna win against him, so the best thing to do would be just to have fun and think move per move…