On Feb. 24th I cashed in some of my hard earned nickels and dimes and attended the seminar Jake Johnston was teaching at West Side Jiu-Jitsu. Now I can’t say I have been to a lot of seminars. My last one was with Sylivo Behring in 2010. But I have attended enough of them, I think to say I know what I like and what I don’t in one. I think my number one pet peeve is paying to work out. I expect to be taught by a master when I go to one. I don’t want to waste precious time doing things I can do any day of the week. We had 4 hours with Jake and I was very please that none of it was doing jumping jacks or other exercises. Jake got right to it. It was noted after, by Mark, that this was Jake’s first official seminar. I for one thought it was excellent. Jake stayed true to the principles of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and shared good solid fundamentals. The 4 hours flew by.
Jake taught us a lot in that 4 hours and its of course hard to remember it all. I have posted all the pictures I got on Facebook.
Jake started out with working on mount escapes. He then worked into defending the cross choke while mounted. He taught us an exercise for working that defense into a sweep. We went over an excellent guard pass that was the most effective one I’ve used to date. It combined leverage with gravity to do something in physics similar to Bruce Lee’s 1 Inch Power Punch
Most of all I enjoyed seeing my Jiu-Jitsu family and renewing old bonds. It really made me feel what I had missed in the last 9 or so months. I will make a special effort to get back at it guys.
Jiu-Jitsu is Life and Life is Jiu-Jitsu