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

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

Caio Terra Seminar - the resumê

So on the 19th of June we hosted a Seminar with Caio Tera, at the Enomoto Dojo in Zürich. The Seminar day began, when we met Caio and two of his buddys from BJJ Team Basel at the early afternoon in Zürich. We walked him around town and had the chance to talk with him about several topics. Hands down, Caio is a really nice down to earth guy with an humungous knowledge about BJJ and Grappling. 

After our visit in Zürich my instructor had a private session wiht Caio where I assisted as a practicing dummy. The topics of this private where mostly focused on BJJ for MMA, as my intstructor is an MMA Fighter. He did variouse set ups vom "de la river guard" to sweep and attack an opponent from the bottom. And what I experienced there was, that Caio is not only a top notch BJJ Player but also has a deep knowledge of what to do, when punches and kicks are involved. An other position they played was a counter from an opponent in half guard which is getting the underhook and tries to mussle his way back up. The counter there was pretty impressive, as it lead to taking the back of the opponent.

Okay, so next on was the seminar, and we began it with a voting of the topic for the seminar the topics were:

- getting out of bad spots 

- leg attacks and leg locks

- leg drag 

- terra guard

- i cant remember ;) 

After a split decision we all agreed on the topic "leg drag". So to start the seminar Caio was rolling with every one of the participants, which is a quite cool warm up programm imho. Than the leg drag journey began with Caio showing us, what the leg drag is. I myself had not really a clue about it and was thinking, okay so this will take us 3 hours ;) but than everything began to make sense. 

We practiced to get to the leg drag from variouse positions, such as half guard, standing and so on. What was also nice, that Caio made us drill with variouse partners so we could learn to apply the moves to different body types. I was really impressed by his teaching skill overall and at the end the obligatory Q&A session began where he answered questions for different positions in real depth.

So all in all I can only say, that this was a great experience and i can only reccomend attending a Caio seminar when possible.

Caio Terra Seminar in Zürich Switzerland

Next tuesday I will be organizing a BJJ-No GI Seminar with Caio Terra here in Switzerland. Location will be the Enomoto Dojo of MMA Fighters Yasubey and Felipe Enomoto which are also my teachers. No to mention that the seminar will focus on the bread and butter techniques of Caio - which is the Half Guard

this is the second Seminar I am organizing via my Buddy Remo from BJJ Team Basel, the first one was with Ryan Hall and was pretty successful, I hope everything works out fine again this time and I cant wait to get destroyed by Caio during rolling :)

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.

Competing to prepare for the Euros

As I stated in my first post and also in the name of the Blog, my goal is to compete at next years European Chamionship in Portugal and eventually win the gold medal in my class. 

So as it would not be a bright idea to just go to the Euros and compete, with no competition experience before hand, I decided to draw up a competition plan and do at least five competitions before next year. Here is what I will try to do:

1. Bavarian Cup BJJ an No-GI Tournament Round 1 in Ansbach (7th of July 2012)

2. Bavarian Cup BJJ an No-GI Tournament Round 2 in Ansbach (4th of August 2012)

3. Bavarian Cup BJJ an No-GI Tournament Round 3 in Ansbach (1st of September 2012)

4. West Germany Championships in BJJ (BJJBD) at Prüm (6th to 7th of October 2012)

5. International German Championships XII in BJJ (BJJBD) at Neuried (24th to 25th of November 2012)

As the Euros will be a Gi-Tournament I will mostly focus on that, but also gonna compete at the No-Gi ones were possible. 

I hope this will give me a little groove when it comes to competing, and will decrease the jitters a bit.