G'day guys, I attended a Royler Gracie seminar recently and thought I'd post a review as suggested by YODA. No pictures at the moment unfortunately, YODA. I might be able to get a group photo off someone though. Basically, what follows is the sequence of how the seminar ran and a broken down detail of the techniques he covered: He started off asking if anyone had any questions, which came as a bit of a shock to the majority of the people at our club I guess since we normally start off with a light wrestle until the instructor starts technique work. Anyway, Royler kept asking if anyone has any questions! Royler likes questions from people. A couple of questions came in which led onto the next part of technique work: In the guard when the guy underhooks our leg to pass our guard - we quickly grab his wrist and when he puts his other hand under we grab that as well. We'll basically do heavy legs on him as we shrimp backwards and MOVE OUR HIPS(!!!) until we can bring one of our legs back under his arm and do the same for the other one, putting him back in our guard. Once we get one leg back under his arm, we can transition straight into triangle - bringing our left leg under his arm means our right leg comes across the back of his neck and under our left knee. When he was told that 'I have trouble getting my leg over the back of his leg far enough that I can put it under my knee', he said sometimes you have to move your hips more, pull your right leg down with your hand, etc., you'll usually have to do this if the guy is bigger than you. Next we covered a very easy sweep to do. From closed guard, we'll open our guard while we've got hold of his sleeves, shrimp our hips back pulling our knee through and getting our right hook on his left side. We then shrimp the other way and get our left hook in. We still have hold of the opponent's sleeves at this point of time and as we sit up, we let go of his left arm with our right hand and underhook his left arm with our right and grab at the back of his belt. The deeper, the better. Still holding onto his right arm with our left hand, we bring that back to our waist and at this point, we move our bum in closer to him if we're too far away by hopping - a little to the opposite side that we're going to sweep him (i.e the right) will also make the sweep a little easier for us. From here, we lift up our right leg while keeping his arm firmly at our waist and end up in mount. Royler also covered a way to work the basic sweep with the simple cross lapel. As we stick our right hand deep in the guy's collar, he's not going to panic too much until we start working our other hand in there. But, as we're working for the choke, SIMULTANEOUSLY we're setting up the sweep as well. Not the choke, then the sweep, then the choke, then the sweep, etc. BOTH TOGETHER! As we're sticking our right hand in his lapel, turn onto the side of our hips, then start working that left hand in as we bring our right shin across his tummy. Royler covered a couple of little tricks to get our chokes includin bringing our right hand up so our elbow is coming up towards the ceiling and our arm parallel to his head, the guy will most likely push down on our elbow - we'll bring our right arm back down quickly as we shoot our left hand in there, both at the same time. If the guy's got his chin tucked in, we'll drive his head up with our arm under his chin, then we'll quickly bring our arm down and up again under his chin. We moved onto a little talk about remembering the floor is our friend, it's there to help us, not pin us down in a tight position. It's there for us to shrimp, move our hips - wherever our hips go, the guy will have to follow. He then demonstrated an escape from scarf hold using the floor as our friend. We bring our hands up close to our neck to protect our face and we turn onto our side, then we'll place our left hand in the guy's face, joining hands with our right and pushing. Push as we move our hips back and turn back onto our back, which should bring the guy's head down towards our feet - bring our left leg over his face and push down with our leg. I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be a neck crank, just make it uncomfortable for our opponent, or what. My partner tapped when I was doing it to him, but I didn't tap. We did a bit of work from the mount, we don't wanna push back against the guy, we want to go with him and work around him. If he pushes on our chest, we come up and become limp so we're heavy for the guy, then we'll underhook (or inderhook) each arm and push them down as we go back flat on the guy. Towards the end of the seminar, we had a lot of Self defense/MMA questions come in from people at this point. I thought the questions such as 'how do you stop someone punching your groin or biting you?', 'what's the best position to be in on the street?', etc. a load of ******** and waste of time since these guys are just looking to dig their head in the sand even further of their little fantasy world with nothing but pure jiu jitsu to their arsenal for self defense and not doing any boxing or kickboxing, not to mention weapons training. I personally don't think Royler's qualified on the self defense aspect to be answering questions like this, as he ignored the possibilites of multiple opponents, weapons, surfaces, etc. The seminar was not what I expected, I was a little dissapointed actually that he didn't have much to show and wanted to answer specific questions more than show us stuff. But, there's a big message that's being shouted in all of our faces I think, which will do more for our progress & development in jiu jitsu than anyone coming to do a seminar and show us stuff. Nobody really had questions which would imply that we have no problems in our games, no weaknesses - our game is perfect. Of course this is rubbish and we always try to pick the brains of people who know more about us on things. So, why is it that when we pay a lot of money for a seminar with one of the greatest people in the sport we have nothing to ask? I think more time needs to be spent reflecting back on our training, analysing what went well, what didn't go well, what we're having trouble with - where we can improve and seek out a solution to a particular problem. Royler is pretty fluent in english, very easy to understand at least. Yet, with english being his secondary language, it could be why his teaching style is nothing to write home about compared to the likes of John Will. But what he does have is a great deal of knowledge and wisdom on what to do in certain situations, what's most likely to be the best technique to use, etc. that very few instructors will be able to match, especially as you get up towards the higher grades. I think with this in mind, if people are to attend a Royler seminar, they should go with specific questions they want answers to and take advantage of his knowledge and wisdom. Another thing I think should be kept in mind is, we should credit Royler for what he is - one of the best jiu jitsu players in the world, not a self defense expert and avoid questions related to the street unless you're looking to bury your head in the sand of ignorance.
