Mark Holst, Braulio Estima & Saturday at Sudbury BJJ

What a beautiful Saturday! The sun is shining, it`s above freezing and we started the day out at Sudbury BJJ for the kids Jiu Jitsu class. Noel and Ben were both excited to get on the mat. Steve ran a good class and had the kids practicing solidifying their base and breaking grips. Ben (my 3 year old) had a meltdown at the end of class because he wanted to keep going, but outside of that, it was all good.

BJJ was awesome today. For me, I sometimes have days where I feel like I`m completely useless on the mat. I can`t escape a bad position to save my life and my timing is off. Then you get a day like today where everything seemed to line up. I was getting out of bad positions with relative ease and the new techniques we worked on seemed to make sense. What I mean by that is sometimes a specific move in BJJ either works well for your bodytype or it doesn`t. It`s not an exact science where you pick a move and work it until you`ve got it. It`s all about flow, moving from one failed move to the next until you get to where you want to be. Today was one of those days where it just felt right. Steve ran a great class. Thumbs up!

In MMA news...

I don`t know Mark Holst personally, but I`ve met him twice. He`s one of the elite fighters from OAMA (Ottawa Academy of Martial Arts) with whom we are an affiliate club. At any rate, Mark has been doing very well in MMA and professional Muay Thai and the team from Sudbury BJJ will stand behind him all the way to the top. I predict it won`t be long before we see him in the UFC`s lightweight division.

Mark is slated to fight Corey Hill (UFC veteran and cast member of the Ultimate Fighter show on Spike) in a month from now. They`ll be fighting for the Xtreme Kombat League lightweight championship in Detroit, Michigan. (Someone should call the promoters of the club and let them know they accidentally spelled "League" correctly. They might want to fix that...(ok, I stole that joke from a thread I read on the Underground, but it`s a good one, so I`ll take it)

Here`s a video of Mark`s fight highlights. You can follow Mark`s blog on his website. www.markholst.com (it`s an interesting one to follow)



Lastly, it was announced on mmajunkie.com that Braulio Estima is set to make his MMA debut vs Rick Hawn (Pan-Am champion in Judo and US Olympian from 2004 with a current record in MMA of 3-0) They`ll be fighting at a catchweight sometime in mid-May for Shine Fights III. I`m looking forward to this one. Braulio is one of the very best BJJ fighters on the planet. (he won the Abu Dhabi Combat Club absolute championship and 88kg division in 2009, the highest level jiu jitsu and grappling tournement in the world)

Good luck to Mark and Braulio!!

Tonight...UFC 110. Heading over to Big Kevin`s place to watch with some friends from the club. Should be a great way to cap off a great day.

Stay healthy my friends!