Robert Drysdale visited my wonderful state of Queensland (QLD) this past weekend. Must say, this is the first time I’ve been to a seminar held by someone outside of Australia. It’s a nice change, to get a different perspective on things.
The seminar itself was split up into two halves. For the first half Drysdale went over some techniques he wanted to go through. The second half was a Question and Answers session. This I felt was both good and bad, the questions and answers meant it was a bit harder to follow and remember all of the different techniques from the first half of the seminar.
Firstly I’ll discuss his mannerisms. I found him to be a very quietly spoken well-mannered individual. I was highly impressed with how he spoke, especially the language, tone and respect he gave everyone. Big Kudus there as I didn’t find him intimating at all to talk too.
I found the technique fine details difficult to remember as it was disparate techniques around an idea. In this case it was about takedowns and defending takedowns. I think people were taken back by this as it’s not something we practise often. I say disparate techniques as it jumped around and didn’t tackle the same issue from different set ups.
This teaching style was mainly visual and oral. I would have preferred if he also had a white board even for a flow chart of the names of the techniques. I find it’s much easier to remember everything we’ve covered if you do it this way. I felt fine points were missing because because of the number of techniques covered. I could sense this from the number of times he had to stop and iterate a fine details that people weren’t doing.
I think this increased because we jumped around to different techniques. Personally I prefer John Will’s style of teaching – he picks a topic and shows you all types of ways to get to and use that position/move. He incorporates simple words AND white boards. I find this helps greatly with remembering.
Technique wise he showed some great stuff. Then again I felt there was little details in some cases then really great details in other cases. So it was a mixed bag so to speak. I found what was really good was him just talking. There he often gave great nuggets of information that you know are gold and can immediately put into your game. Overall these bits of information were more related to concepts. It would have been great if he taught around the concepts not an individual technique.
Questions and Answer part was quite good. I asked immediately about training intensity and not going 100%. One key thing he said was, don’t go limp and not fight for grips etc if you are going at an easier pace. Don’t just give the guy stuff and go slow otherwise your timing will be bad. This is the exact problem I’m having. So I’ll be working out how to stay relaxed and not go with intensity, but still get what I need to done. He did say, that you should never go hard enough that you gas yourself out in going for a submission or something. Once you are gassed out even a new white belt can beat you.
Other questions revolved around x-guard, de la riva, brabo chokes and counter’s to knee bar defence (figure four legs). I did find the answer to my question really provided me with great insight. Another great insight was the whole “steps” people take. We use those because we need to learn the steps, but the reality is often we need to make all the steps happen at the same time or very close to each other. Even a little pause gives a person a chance to make a minor balance adjustment and completely negate your move.
Overall it was a solid seminar. However the hardest part by far was remembering the fine details to all of the techniques we did because they didn’t link and build upon each other. I’m glad he answered my question and he even answered the heart of the issue I was having without even being told.
The key things that he covered that can directly help me now include:
- Escaping the Half guard lockdown
- Fantastic grip for attacking someone that has you in half guard
- Entry to De La Riva
- Concepts around simultaneous steps and keeping momentum
- Answer to my problem of timing
- Single leg defence
- Takedown combo.
Dan
Training has been going slow and steady for me as of late. I’m just getting back into my old gym and trying to step up in a few areas. One thing I didn’t want this blog to be is a, oh I trained this tonight. I wanted it to be more of a reflective blog about the basics of BJJ. So part of that has seen me go back to the beginner class in an assistant instructor rule. Essentially being someone else’s test dummy.