A Great Jitsu Seminar

Went to a Jiu Jitsu seminar today at our training center.

The visiting instructor was black belt Evandro Nunes.

A Brazilian, he's rather tall, and he's been a successful BJJ fighter and is now one of the top instructors for Gracie Survival Tactics  - A Gracie Jiu Jitsu program tailored for law enforcement usage.

Very effective stuff and excellent hand to hand training police to be able to control bad guys using technique rather than brute strength.

He began  the seminar with a brief intro and then asked what we were interested in learning. From a few questions he put together a 2-hour seminar on the fly. His technique looks effortless and amazing smooth, and all his years of practice are very evident.

It began with guard passing techniques and a philosophical approach to passing guard.  The idea is to have less focus on forcing a pass but instead more on first observing what your opponent is trying to do, and then move from safe  position to the next safe position and finally to a position where the opponent almost prefers that you pass their guard.

From there, we did some choke techniques and I'm happy to say I've now learned how to do the Anaconda choke, which is impressively nasty.  Basically if someone tries to get you off of mount position or knee on belly the wrong way they open themselves up for an Anaconda attack.  Much fun. I need more practice with it to really get it locked in, it but it's one heckuva neat technique. 

We then moved on to answers to knee on belly and how to either adjust to reduce the effectiveness of the technique or sweep someone doing a knee on belly technique.  Very fun stuff, and I need to work on that.

Finally we finished with a defense from a knife attack whether the attacker is below us or mounted on us. Good technique to control the attacking arm.  Downside is you likely are going to get stabbed and possibly more than once if someone pulls a knife in an entangled fight, but having some answer to it is better than nothing. 

A great seminar and I learned a ton in 2 hours.  Then we did some rolling which was a lot of fun and we got to try out some of the techniques we had learned.

Evandro is a super skilled and talented instructor and a super nice guy.  Great instructor with an excellent teaching manner. 

Did I mention he's really tall?

He's a great guy and I look forward to him visiting and holding another seminar soon.