training this month and Fabio Gurgel Seminar

Training this year has been pretty hit and miss but I seem to be getting back into the swing of things. I'm writing this after a 6.30am driving lesson and let me tell you driving in the Middle East is an adrenalin filled affair, lanes exist purely as a rough guideline of where you should be and people seem to think nothing of swerving into oncoming traffic or going off road if they have to que for more than 5 minutes. Anywhooo I'm looking forward to coming back to the UK for ten days in February, unfortunately it doesn't co-inside with any kul bjj related events, other than getting to go to canton and btt and train with my old team mates but I am hella excited about it!

Things at the academy are good, we hopefully have someone starting to teach yoga which is great because lately our stretching in class has been non existent. I'm still doing capoeira every now and then and might start more after the abu dabi comp or if i ever pass my test and get a car!

The big news is we are having a week seminar with Fabio Gurgel, one of the co-founders of Alliance in April, there might even be a whole gang of his black belts coming with to train at the academy before the abu-dabi world pros so that will be something to look forward to, here is an article in gracie mag about our school in Bahrain http://www.graciemag.com/en/2009/12/alliance-heads-to-the-middle-east/ hehe I'm easy to spot in the picture due to my mega pink gi!

I keep getting pissed off every time i get an event invite for something in the English bjj scene that i can't go to I feel like I'm missing out on a lot but I'm trying to keep focused on training here. Reza now teaches the basic alliance course on 3 days of the week which I'm still trying to get used to, there's alot of self defence techniques and details on some of the moves that I haven't seen before, theres 25 lessons all in all and we're up to 16 but I think we will need to go through it a few more times before I get the hang of everything.

I'm reading a lot of books at the minute, one being jiu jitsu university which I amazingly found it in a book store here. It made me chuckle when I read that blue belts should be working on mastering escapes as I feel that's all I had been getting good at lately. Another book is The essential guard, carrying on from my last post I am finding this a good book for helping me to attack more as there are lots of Nice submissions and it progresses through attacking and defending closed and open guard. I always find that books or a dvd can give you a bit of extra motivation which I have defiantly been needing at the minute. I think this weekend I will put up some shelves because my book collection is getting slightly out of hand and Alex is getting increasingly concerned that the huge tower of books on the bedside table will collapse in the night and bury him while he sleeps hehe.