words, words, words

What have I been doing?

I’ve not been writing on this blog, but I’ve been training a lot as well as preparing for the new arrival.

After the South American Championships, I’ve fought in two other tournaments and won my division.  It makes me a bit nervous, though, since tomorrow I am going to Rio for the Campeonato Brasileiro de Jiu-Jitsu.  I feel like I have been on a bit of a roll, and I don’t want it to end.    

But that is what I’ve been doing, training BJJ twice a day, running about every other day, and lifting weights.  

Wish me luck!

This was a small competition in Porto Alegre, but I managed to get my winning fight from the final recorded!

This doesn’t happen very often.

Usually, if I win, there are technical difficulties or nobody to film it.  So this was nice.  The video is large.  But I compressed it down from “giant” to “enh, glad I have good bandwidth”.

I have had a couple of emails from people who want to train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Porto Alegre. If you are coming here for a short period of time or for an extended trip, and want to train BJJ, feel free to send me an email. bkoplitz@gmail.com
My instructor is happy to have people come by and train BJJ with us at the academy.  Visitors are welcome and received with open arms.

I think that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu needs a shorthand notation of the movements and positions.

Too many times I’ve tried to read text-only blog entries about positions and have had them stop making sense halfway through. For example, people will start talking about an attack from side-mount and then talk about moving your hand to attack, but forget to talk about which hand they mean.  The one by their opponent’s head? Or the one by their opponent’s hips?

The thing is, I know I do this, too.  I take notes on classes and I know that if I passed them to someone else, they would be lost.

I was asking about how ballet teachers write down their movements they make during a dance, and she told me about dance notation.

So, my proposal is, invent a BJJ shorthand notation.  Anyone want to help?

This is a type of dance notation. The image is from Wikipedia.

Lately I’ve been thinking about offense and defense in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and this is what I’ve come up with:  There is a definite line that divides what you are doing into either an offensive or a defensive move.
I know there is nuance in this, there are aggressive-defensive moves and defensive-aggressive moves, but at some point you have to chose to defend or attack.
The nice thing about BJJ is that when you are defending, it is really hard to attack.  So if you can keep pressure on, keep blitzing your opponent the entire time.  It is easier to setup other attacks.
For example, if you are going for a person’s arm and then you are having trouble getting them to stop defending it, you can apply a weak choke attack to get them to free their arm so you can revert to your first attack.

This is what I am calling Binary BJJ, if you are defending (0) then you cannot attack (1).

The pressure that attacks cause is what separates this sport from chess. It is a lot harder to relax and think about what would be the most efficient attack you could make when you have a forearm cutting off the blood to your brain.  The defense is a lot more urgent, and there isn’t as much time to mull over your next move.

The weirdest thing just happened. Right after I wrote that post about wanting to be able to save my BJJ game: I got my purple belt! It came a huge surprise. My instructor Flavio Ferreria gave it to me after a seminar that he and De La Riva gave here in Porto Alegre. I’m super-grateful and honored.