Easily the best thing about Christmas time is the queuing. It’s fantastic. You go out to the shops, you queue to get into the carpark, then you queue to get a space, then you queue for the bank machine. Once you have money to spend, you queue to buy stuff followed swiftly by an intense queueing session at the coffee shop to keep yourself alive. Once you’ve survived all that fun, you queue to get your kid to see Santa and then queue on the way out of the car park again. It really is the season to be jolly.

Moan over.

The new year is going to be an exciting time for all at KO Martial Arts. I’m changing around the timetable (yet again) as it’s becoming just too difficult to manage all of the beginners we’re getting in the doors. I want the classes to give everyone the best possible chance of improving, and with the greatest of respect to everyone who comes in, there’s only so much head squeezing experienced guys can put up with! For those of you who don’t know about BJJ, head squeezing is a vital learning process- you do it for a few weeks of your early days thinking that it makes people tap, then someone tells you that it doesn’t and just makes people’s head sore the next day. Then you do it for a few weeks after that anyway in case they were wrong. Then you quit on it but bring it out occasionally when you’re being owned so that you can slow someone down, then hopefully it goes away forever, but not before you’ve cause 3 neck injuries, annoyed the shit out of 10 experienced people and cauliflowered at least 3 ears. It’s mostly found when people train in the gi.

Here I am, trying in vain to finish a
footlock for Youss, Gordy just looks bored

So the new timetable will have beginner and intermediate splits for BJJ and MMA especially. With stand-up it’s not so bad as people can pair off as they see fit anyway and the material can be totally different. I’ve yet to figure a way of doing this that will squeeze it’s way into the time available by the way, but I will. I’ve been sitting here all morning (supposed to be doing some ahem, other work) with several sheets of paper figuring out the best way to squeeze all of this in, but no joy yet.

The basic idea is to finally put in place the plan I’ve always had for the gym but have never either had the time to do it or membership numbers to justify it. The formation of the fight team (cool name to follow) has meant that now there are a guaranteed 10-15 guys who are there to compete all year round, which means that they’re going to be looked after seperately and will do their sparring, conditioning etc. at different times. The other classes will be dedicated to those people who are either beginners or just training to train and learn. It means that in the casual classes (for want of a better word) people will get more attention than they would if there were fighters training beside them. I will still continue to train fighters in the same classes as beginners as if you read back on the blog, you’ll see that I have some strong opinions on that too. We’re a team, from the guy who walks in the door to lose a few pounds by hitting some pads to the guy who wants to fight pro.