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

3rd day of the Braulio Estima Summer Camp + El Toros S&C Session

On day three of the BJJ Summer Camp we focused at the morning session again on back escapes which really seem to work good for me. What I really found quite funny was, that during the positional sparring session, which we did after every technique session, I was able to execute the moves pretty well, also on higher belts, but when it came to sparring I mostly got demolished by the same guys. I was thinking, that maybe the links between certain moves could be the reason for that – who knows…

After the morning training, we went to El Toros Circuit Training, which was quite some fun, although it rained most of the time. This strength and conditioning session really showed me, that I have to work more in this area and that this sort of trainig could really could benefit my jits.

Here is the link to El Toro where you could also see video of the S&C Circuit: EL TORO

Here is the picture of our illustrious round which did the circuit. 

At the end of the session El Toro also talked a little bit about the Paleo Diet, if you havent heard of it take a look here: 


The Paleo Diet


I thought about doing some cross fit in the near future, cause there is on CF Club in Zürich, which also offers early morning classes two times per week, which would be perfect for me and my though working schedule…

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 .

2nd Day of the Braulio Estima Summer Camp

On the second day of the camp two Gi trainings where scheduled, one at 10:30 pm and one at 02:30 pm. The day started with a "good" breakfast, man I don't exactly know how these guys good it loads of that stuff in the morning. All I could see were sausages, bacon, beans and eggs in all variations. The sportsman I am I sticked to Cornflakes with with various fruits and the occasional bread with marmalade.

After breakfast it was time to take the 30 Minutes walk to the fort regent, which was
indeed a pretty good warm up. An to say the least it was typical british weather, raining all day long. Training started with the self warm-up. During the week these self warm-ups gave me the option to come up with my one warm-up routine which I will use before tournaments. The funny thing about warm-up was that some guys didn't really warm up, but just rolled at a freaking high pace. So my buddy Lukas came up with the word "einrollen" which still makes laugh pretty hard – it is german and translates to rollin in.





As nobody was seriously damaged during "einrollen" the second day started again with the topic "escaping the sidemount" where Braulio added a few twists to escaping that position. It was unbelievable to experience the teaching skills of Braulio, as for him BJJ is like driving a bus through various junctions where you have the options to go where you want.




On Sunday Braulios Brother Victor also joined the camp and a few more people where also there as you can see on the picture on the right. In the evening it was soccer time as the quarterfinals of the European Championship were going on although matches weren't that exciting.

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/