Balls!

My good buddy Hywel Teague over at Fighters Only sent me this link.

It’s him performing some nice solo grappling drills on a balance ball. I just got my hands on one of these things at the start of the year, and let me tell you it’s a great tool for working out on your own.

There are a whole bunch of things you can do with a stability ball to help your grappling.

1) Improve your balance
2) Improve your “flow” on the smooth / round surface
3) Improve your constant downwards pressure; Make your transitions between positions seemless, leaving no gaps for escape

I haven’t done anything more exciting on mine than some funky pushups and stability drills, but that’s partly because my home “workout room” is 1) Japanese-sized and 2) also the laundry room , meaning if I sprawl out on the ball my nose is in my drying underpants and my toes are hanging out the window. But still, I can feel it doing good.

Anyway, on with the drill, with an explanation from Hywel himself. I always wondered how to pronounce his name… Lucky I saw this or else I would have called him “Hyoowul”.

A freestyle solo drill for BJJ players, submission grapplers or MMA fighters.

Stability ball training is very useful for grapplers in that it allows you to develop core strength, flexibility, balance and spacial awareness while working with an unpredictable piece of equipment. You can replicate moves you would usually perform when rolling as well as have fun. This is a drill when done as a warm up but is also beneficial to those are limited to solo training or are sidelined with injury and are unable to grapple.

Video by Hywel Teague, BJJ purple belt, coach certified with Straight Blast Gym International and editor of Fighters Only magazine.

Filmed at Caged Steel gym in Dewsbury, UK.
Music: Probot, ‘The Emerald Law’

Straight Blast Gym UK
Fighters Only Magazine
Caged Steel

Judo 17 Jan

A good training session. I’m starting not to feel like a three legged hunchback during uchi-komi (drills) now, which is nice. I still can’t remember the names of anything to save my life.

I drill the foot in sweepy thing, the hooking foot sweepy thing, the foot out sweepy thing, and the turning around and squatting down thing.

Randori is going OK. I managed to pull off a nice footsweep, but it was against a waif of a fourteen year old girl. Still, there is hope.

Had a karate kid-style moment where I threw the instructor with the foot in sweepy thing. He said “That was great. What were you doing differently?” and I, not realising I was stumbling into a scene from a cheesy 80’s martial arts flick, said “I wasn’t thinking about throwing you, only relaxing and doing the move properly.” “Bingo!” Then he said something about Okinawa and belts, but I wasn’t really listening.

Anyway, the important thing for judo is just to get some randori experience so that I am not so stiff standing up in the BJJ comps. Anything else is a bonus.