New Mascot for Man-Alive Martial Arts and LV Jiu-Jitsu Club

TA DA!! We are pleased to announce that our group, gym and club all now are sharing a new mascot.

Some years ago the Man-Alive Martial Arts Gym had logo's created and began to establish a brand. During that time with our thinking along the lines of the overall look and feel of our group, we wanted to have a mascot that could also identify our gyms or clubs. Naturally we used the organisation mascot's as a jumping off point, and a large number of the gyms and clubs or groups associated with the BJJ organisation have followed suit and used similar concepts and imagery in their own creations.

I have seen multiple variations on the Gorilla and Monkey themes, ranging from Buddha's to Faces to Jerry Bears as gorillas, to many others...So not wanting to be left out, we have decided to embody a new variation on the theme ---- THE FLYING MONKEY--- (and by 'Monkey' we might mean 'Gorilla')

As we have the formal art work finished, we will give you a small teaser with some renditions from the web. None of these are the finished product or even our product, they are all taken from Google searches.

In honour of our new mascot, I have also named one of our Escape or Bottom game positions after it as well. For those who have been in class over the last month while we were working on our Bottom game, there came a position that I didn't have a name for. And while quite a common position for us, and for other groups within the organisation I'm sure, I've not seen it named as such. I have seen parts of the position named separately, but using them all together as a whole we decided that it needed to be called something...

Let us introduce the Flying Monkey Bottom Position. It now completes our 5 escape postures from the bottom, these being: Iron Board (Mount), Lazy Baby (thanks Elliott & Open Mat), Stoned Squirrel (1/2 Guard), Straight Jacket, and Flying Monkey.

For more on these positions, come out to the club and see what the heck we're talking about....

Review on teaching and class progression

So with all best intentions, I started this Blog as a way to update and solidify my thoughts and teachings as far as the Leslieville Jiu-Jitsu Club classes were concerned.

And as I do- I'm finding out what a huge commitment this was to even just be able to sit down and type out what we are doing all the time. It has fallen to the wayside even as I try my best to recap and stay on top of things, but now I have a new thought for posting.... It happens when it happens. I'm not going to try to have every single class we do on line anymore (plus it only lasted a coupled weeks). 

The ideas of my style of teaching and the positions and concepts of our curriculum will be posted as we go through them, or as I have something to add to them, or as we feel the need to answer any questions from our students and friends about what we do.

So on to our Curriculum....as I started this club the idea was to go with a rotating and repeating curriculum. Over the course of a few weeks the material covered would be repeated and continuously worked on. Something similar to several other clubs in the organisation were doing. The next idea was to have specific classes for a specific focus that worked together over the course of a week. With the triple curriculum and 3x classes every week the idea was to have Fundamental, Technical and Rolling class plans that worked in harmony with each other following the rotation of the overall material. I still like the idea behind this, and still organise my classes in this manner- in my head. The problem with having such detailed class plans was that as things changed with our curriculum's (which they do almost every time I teach), the class plans would have to be constantly updated and changed as well. What this didn't allow for was fluidity and adjustment for new concepts and positions. So, what we are doing now is keeping only the general overall month to month class progression. This is as follows: Month 1- Guard, Month 2- Top, Month 3- Bottom. That's it. This allows our students to get an idea of the game within the trial period of 12 weeks, while also allowing us to open up our classes and work on more general or specific techniques. So as we go along, all of our planned classes with cover a small part of one of the general concepts for that month.

Hope this makes it easier to follow along with us, and will help direct your questions to the current topics for that month. So if its anything to do with Guard, such as passing guard, holding guard, specific guard games, etc. That would all be covered in a Guard month (not all at once or in the same month, but under that section. So we could be doing a month of Guard passing, or a month of Guard retention). Same goes for Top or Bottom games and positions and everything associated with them.

Happy Rolling! See you on the mats.