Been promoted to blue belt and new goals

Hey everybody, 

It has been a long time since my last post and I am happy to tell you guys, that I have been finally promoted to blue belt after 2,5 years of sometimes less but in the last month more and consistent training. The blue belt was given to me by Christian Graugart who organized the CSA Summer Camp at his gym in Denmark. 

As I was allready registred for the IBJJF Rome Open at Adult/White/Feather, I now swichted up to Master/Blue/Light so I dont have to cut the missing 4 kg in the next two weeks ;). I see this tournament as good experience for me, to have my first IBJJF tourney in my pocket and see how things are done there. I don't expect to much success as I am pretty new at this belt level, but I am definitly looking forward to the good experience this will give me. 

Further more, I am going to change this blog a little bit and tell you guys more about my training etc. 

My next big goal will be the IBJJF European Open next year!

Acai baby...

For a long time a have been looking to get some proper Acai in Switzerland and/or Germany. I got to taste a little of it through my protein powder from XTFC which tastes pretty great for a protein shake. During the Braulia Estima Summer camp I also had the chance to taste the coco nut water with acai from Vita Coco which also tasted allright. For sure like most of you I heard numerous stories of how good it is and that everybody who went to Brasil was swarming about that stuff.

So as I am recently one week per month in Frankfurt for working purposes and I searched the Internet and found the following provider of frozen Acai Pads - Fine Fruites Club. A few days ago I ordered myself a couple of Acai and some Mango and Maracuja pads. Yesterday the pads where finally delivered after two days, in a box with dry ice, so it was no problem to get the pads delivered to my office and put them into the fridge in the evening.

For my first smoothy I didnt go to nuts and just went with the proposal from the distributor for a Acai smoothy:

• 1 Pad of Acai
• 1 Pad of Mango
• 150 ml Orange Juice
• 2 table spoons of Honey

I really have to say that this stuff is just great and I am looking forward to experimenting with it and mix some new things to it.

For sure I am going to try the famous Rener Gracie Acia Bowl soon – here is Video of that sweet bastard

Crossfitting

Yesterday I did my first real crossfit exercise with my buddy Lukas who is doing this stuff for some time now. I first got in touch with it at the Braulio Estima Summer Camp where we did a circuit at the El Toro Training Center.

The Workout of the day was as following:

5 x 200m sprints followed by 200m slow running (not a big Problem)
3 x 10 burpree Pull-ups (dude that was a big problem)
3 x 20 Airsquats (it was going allright)
3 x 30 seconds handstand

We did the whole program at a sport facility which recently also got a Crossfit "Cage" as you can see on the picture below:

 

I was asking myself the last weeks, if I should start with crossfit or not, as I am doing Kettlebells and other stuff, but I think that this would really benefit my overall cardio and body strength, so I will try to do it once a week on weekends, at least as long as the weather is good. Because that way I dont have to pay a cent for the whole thing which is always nice.

I recently found a pretty nice article about the benefits from crossfit for BJJ on the following blog:

Benefits of crossfit for BJJ

In the next days i will post my new training plan, which will be a little bit more divers than the old one and also will involve more BJJ related things, such as stability ball drilling and drilling with my Zebra dummy

The cauliflower chronicles

Damn it, I finally got my first cauliflower ear, as you can see in the picture below

At the beginning of last week i recognized a little bump in my inner ear, but as it wasn't to bad and I was on a business trip the whole week I didnt worry to much about it. I think this is also a little present I took home from the Summer Camp, as I wasnt able to do any jits due to my bad shin. Never the less, went to No-Gi training yesterday and now it has swollen to a point where I am definitely gonna see a doctor today. I curiouse what he will say, but from my point of view there is only one option, which is, to drain the damn thing…

If you never see a proper drainage have a look at Kurt Osiander in the video below

As I  lended the title for this blog entry from one of my favourite books related to BJJ, I have to give it a shutout. 

The book is called: The Cauliflower Chronicles: A Grappler's Tale of Self Discovery and Island Living and was written by Marshal D. Carper. I've read the book twice so far and I can really recommend it, as it is well written and an easy and quick read for those who love BJJ and are intrested to get a little insight into the Hawaiian Culture

2nd Day addon Braulio Estima Summer Camp

so trough the antibiotics I got at the hospital, my infection got way better and I will be back training at the beginning of next week. 

Never the less, one thing I forgotten to mention, that on the second day of the Braulio Estima Summer Camp, there were also some promotions going on – I mean what could be better, than receiving your belt from Braulio Estima. He handed out one blue, one purple, one brown and also one black belt. You can find more information on here

Gracie Barra Channel Islands

It was great to see these promotions and also the feelings attached, especially for the higher belts - I mean, come on, everybody especially as a white belt, dreams of the day receveing your black - and it was somehow emotional to see such things happen, after years of blood, sweat, tears an commitment - allthough i knew Rob at that moment only for a few hours, I could imagine the effort he put in to get to this level .

Bad infection on the shin...

Damn it, it seems that I brought something not so nice home from my Training Camp at the Chanel Island. The thing started last week on Thursday when I woke up during the night we some notable pain in my left lower leg. I recognized that it was swollen up a bit and put some counterpain on it and got back to sleep. The next day when I woke up the leg was still swollen but I didnt put to much thinking on it and went to training. During training i asked on of the local Black Belts for some ice and showed him the shin – we agreed that it might have come from a shin to shin hit and that it was not more than a simple contusion.  I dont necessarily think, that the infection came from the camp itself, but I also was doing some body boarding on Friday with some open wounds on my feet. Who knows where the shit is from...

Things went pretty well until Monday when i first recognized that my left shin an foot were swollen pretty badly in comparison to my other foot and that the shin began to turn red. But I thought okay – lets put a little ice on it and it will be good anyhow. Yesterday things stayed the same, only the leg got a little more red, but never the less i decided that I want to attend wrestling class at my Dojo, when I came in and changed one of my instructors saw my foot and told me to go immediately to the hospital as this could properly be a bad infection.

So I went to the local hospital near the place I live and they took some blood, X-Rayed my leg and than told me not be surprised that I had an infection on my foot and that I need take antibiotics for one week and that I will have to wear a cast on my food which i neglected, and they give me some sort splint which can be taken on an off instead. 

At least this enables me to drive and walk around at work. I will keep the splint on during night and from what I have seen and feel the antibiotics already started to work as the redness got lighter and a notable war is going on in my leg. I really hope that everything turns out good and that i will be back training in about 10 to 14 days. The sad part is, that I wont be able to compete this week which would have been my first tourney in preparation towards the European Championship.

But: HEALTH IS A TOP PRIORITY and I will be able to compete and train an other day

1st Day of the Braulio Estima Summer Camp

As stated before in this blog, I travelled with a buddy of mine to the Braulio Estima Summer Camp held at Jersey Islands (St. Helier)

We landed on Saturday the 23rd and had a modest time before the first training started at 2:30 pm, so we first went to our hotel which wasnt that beautiful as I thought from its Internet presentation. After a quick check-in we went to a grocery store nearby to get some proper food and than went on to explore our way to the Fort Regent Center. As big as the Center was, it wasn't that easy to find, but after some searching we managed to get our way up to the center.

I have to admit something like this is not really common at our lines of latitude – this center provides you with a single point of contact for various sports related activities, ranging from the classical muscle pharm, were the big boys are lifting steal to various martial arts academies and a superior children's playground. After some further searching we found the playground of the guys from Gracie Barra Chanel Islands and were first a little unsure, if the announced 45 people would even fit into this room, but after a few minutes of waiting we were guided to the training area for the camp which was pretty big as you can see below

I really have to admit, that I was immediately impressed, looking around and seeing 4 Black Belts, 5 Brown Belts various Purples and Blues, which is not common for the gym I am training – not taking anything away from this guys. So after a short periode of self-warmup Braulio divided us in groups of four to five with the task of writing down some topics which we would like to be covered during the seminar. In addition to his topics this lead to the following three main topics for the week

• Sidemount Escapes
• Back Escapes
• Open Guard

The first day started for us with Braulio showing us a nice side mount escape when also your right arm is trapped an you can only maneuver with your left – to my surprise this escape ended in a sneaky arm bar, which I cant wait to try out on some of my training buddies ;)

After that relatively short session, we ended the day with a group photo rocking our free Camp T-Shirts

Training Plan for the Summer Camp

Finally I got my hands on the training plan for the BJJ Summer Camp of Braulio and Victor Estima 

I am really looking forward to training a lot this week, all in all it is going to be 15 hours of BJJ Gi and No-Gi training and I hope that this will take my game to an other level and that i can profit a lot from the skills of Braulio and his brother.

There will also be some recreational activities and I am really looking forward to meeting other BJJers from around the glob - allthough I am guessing that the vast majority will be out of U.K.

Training routine

So with this blog post I want to give you little insight into my current training routine:

Monday Morning: running for 30 min than streching
Monday Evening: strenght and conditioning (Kettlebelss/Pullups/BWEs)
Tuesday Morning: yoga and streching
Tuesday Evening: grappling and sparring
Wednesday Morning: nothing - I got to sleep longer in the morning one time ;)
Wednesday Evening: swimming
Thursday Morning: running for 30 min than streching
Thursday Evening: BJJ and sparring
Friday Morning: yoga and stretching
Friday Evening: strenght and conditioning (Kettlebelss/Pullups/BWEs)
Saturday Midday: grappling and sparring
Satruday Afternoon: tabatta uphill sprints
than rest unitl monday

What I also do every day, is the "pushup of the day" from Martin Rooney's Pushup Warrior - I really like this app cause it counts your progression and overall done pushups, here is a review: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/12/quickadvice-pushupwarrior

For my abdominal muscles I use the following routine:
http://fitness4mma.de/fit-bauchmuskeln.php

For my kettlebell training I started with the videos from Budovideos:
http://www.budovideos.com/online/category/shows/kettlebell/

So I really hope to be in good shape for the Braulio Estima Summer Camp and that I can profit as much as possible from this week of training.

Braulio Estima Summer Camp

So I decided to participate at the Braulio Estima Summer Camp which will be held on the Chanel Islands from 23rd of June to 30th of June.

This is acctually going to be the first time training twice a day and I am quite curiouse how my body will respond to that. Nevertheless I hope that this intense week of training will really boost my game and that I am going to learn a lot from Braulio and his brother Victor.

At the moment eleven people are registred including one of my friends - so I have a training partner with me, which is quite nice from my point of view.

For sure I am gonna make daily updates during the camp on here, concerning what we learned and all the other stuff that is going to happen

Here is the link to Camp

http://braulioestima.eventbrite.com/