Seminar and new blue belts @ CB Bolton!

Sunday 17th March saw Darren and Helen Currie gracing the mats at the club, delivering what I can only describe as a truly awesome master class on the half guard.  I've attended dozens of seminars by Darren and Helen in the past and the half guard is one of his best; on this occasion Darren promised to show us a totally different way of approaching the half guard position and he wasn't wrong.

 

Starting off with the basic entries into the half guard and maintaining the half guard, Darren showed a number of really slick sweeps from an arm tie up, something which I'd not seen before.  After these sweeps, another batch of high percentage and super cool sweeps followed, inspired by the legendary Marcelo Garcia, all of which went down really well by all attendees, myself included.

Group photo

In between the techniques, Darren came over to me and showed me some other juicy techniques that Helen and himself had been working on, as well as some interesting concepts on certain positions, all of which I will be applying into my game immediately.

 

After the technical side of things over, everyone put theory into practice with some rolling and the session went way over time, with Helen rolling with more or less everyone and once the seminar finally ended, Helen promoted five students to blue belt.

Darren, Steve, Liam, Tim, Lee, Brendan & Helen

Huge congrats to Lee 'Bones' Jones, the lightest and youngest blue belt at the club, aged 17; Steve 'Robocop' Holt, Liam Holt, Tim Wilson and Brendan Gallagher on their promotions; all the guys train hard every week, rarely missing a class and are a credit to themselves, the club and Combat Base UK.

 

Massive thanks to Darren and Helen for the seminar and giving everyone real value for money, as well as giving me some awesome new material to play around with; thanks to Dave Kari from Voodoo Gym, Lee 'Demolition Man' James from KP Centre, Heywood and Mike Ng from NGT Runcorn for coming over and supporting the event.