Leuven summer camp day 1: Control the space

“Where are you from? Australia! Wow you’ve come a long way to camp!”

“Yeah but no actually, I live in France, not quite as far..” I had this conversation on repeat during day 1 of BJJ Globetrotters Summer Camp in Leuven, but I didn’t mind much.

The speed dating part of the welcome session was a great opportunity to try to start putting names to faces, and learn where in the world everyone is from. However with 200+ people at camp, Christian told us not to feel bad about needing to introduce ourselves to the same people multiple times this week!

Germany, Malaysia, UK, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, USA.. the international atmosphere here is awesome.

I was really happy to see a good bunch of people I’d met at the 2014 Copenhagen Fall Camp, including a guy I had given one of my ‘gypsy girl’ patches to – he’d sewn it onto his gi – so cool!

Keeping with tradition, Christian taught the first class of camp – “Bellybutton touching contest + attacking made easy.” I really like Christian’s teaching style and the way he encourages us to look at things simply: fundamentally jiu jitsu is all about defending the space between your chest and your knees. Open up when you have control of the space, and close when you don’t have control.

“Imagine you’re in a castle and you run out to attack, but run back in when the enemy advances.”

Christian believes that approaching rolls like this allows you to be more creative; you’re worried less about executing particular moves and instead just focus on putting/keeping something in that chest-to-knee space to control it – and it can be anything – an arm, a knee, your head, how about a finger? He encouraged us to experiment and see what worked and what didn’t.

“If your first focus is to take the space, everything else (passing etc) is going to be easier.”

“Just fucking shoot and hope they don’t get past your cannons” – common mistake.

Christian also got us to try rolling while one of us commentated out loud, to show how we should work on that flow chart in our heads.

It certainly took a lot of the usual stress out of the roll for me. Instead of thinking ahead and trying to remember set ups, I kept focused on just getting into that space and staying there – and I found myself naturally turning to moves that made sense for the position I was in.