[TRIANGLEFROMGAURD]

Originally Posted by Gambatte Karate

Well Joe, I can't find our other thread....But I just got back from Gracie Tampa. No vids. Sorry guys. It was all rolling, no striking. That sux for me, but I played anyway. I got submitted 7 times by a guy my own size, and 3 times by another guy who was about 30 lbs more than me. It was odd, to me, to start off on our knees and go from there.

It was a blast anyway. As I told everyone, we do almost NO ground work in our system. There is some there, but we don't concentrate on it a lot. I was sweating my ass off in there. I never did get to see Rob though.

The really odd part to me was the seemingly complete lack of organization. Although it was a open mat night, I felt there should have been someone who was obviously in charge, and that was not the case. Maybe I just came on a bad night. I dunno. There were about 9 guys there in one room, while the women were in the other room. After the third time being submitted, I jokingly asked if I should go over with the women. Everyone got a laugh out of that. Two of the guys were only working on striking, and I wanted in on that, but they said no, two other guys were working on what looked like Judo, but I could be wrong. The rest were rolling. Tough workout, but I still didn't get hit in the face. Oh well....Maybe next time.

Seriously mad respect to you for going bro, I really hope you had a good time!!

Originally Posted by john55

Thats awesome that you tried it. You should definitely try a class though as well. Open Mat is generally just people rolling. No formal instruction. When you go to actual class, you will generally do a group warm up, the instructor will show you a series of techniques that you work with a partner on, and then you will roll.

My class generally starts from the ground to. The main reason being lack of space. If we want to start standing, we are more than welcome though, we just need to go to a different part of the mat. We always have guys in my school working on judo, wrestling etc techniques such as takedowns and throws. Sometimes we even have judo or wrestlers teach our class when working on something from their system that bjj doesnt cover as well. My school is very open to doing what works and using things from other systems when needed...one being the takedowns and takedown defense of wrestling and the throws/trips of judo.

And my first 5 classes or so, I was getting submitted every few seconds until I learned some basic defense which helped me from most of the white belts for at least a few minutes.

We start on our knees when we are doing submission grappling but, we have an entire day set aside to just work take downs. I'm a big fan of different take downs that most people aren't looking for like over under throws and 2 on 1 stuff.