Unity in MMA

When I first started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu/MMA Standup, I threw myself into it and devoted every evening of my life to the gym. What started out as a way to pass time has turned into something more than a passion. It’s not a hobby. A hobby is something you enjoy doing every now and again that you enjoy. This… is something completely different.

I hate the sport as much as I love it. It confuses me, I get beat up, the gym stinks, my gloves smell, half of my clothes are used to train in, I get in late, the way I eat revolves around training, in short – it full blown stresses me out.

But it’s the only thing I’ve ever been half decent at and THAT’S what I share in common with everybody else in the gym.

If you’ve bothered to read the ‘About Your Author’ page you’ll catch on that I never excelled at anything. I’m not well read, good looking or particularly smart. My parents are working class and emigrated from Hong Kong some 40 years ago. They moved to Manchester and started doing what they knew, my dad became a cook (not a chef, a cook – the difference being he never worked in a 5 star establishment or wore a clean white uniform, he worked in a grease filled kitchen for minimum wage doing stupid hours in Chinatown) and my mum became a waitress but would quit to become a seamstress only to return to waitressing.

My siblings and I were raised by my grandma who isn’t my real grandma but she is and later on my cousins would move into our house making it 9 people in a house with 3 bedrooms. From there we moved into a takeaway where I started helping my parents out by answering the telephone and taking orders, fetching buckets of chips, peeling prawns and the normal stuff an 8 year old did to have fun. When I was 11 maybe 12, we moved to Padiham which, if you forget about the racism and general scummery of the place, was a pretty sweet place to grow up. You had fields everywhere. A disused railway track and backstreets where kids would play football/drink/smoke until all hours.

Anyway, in Padiham I spent a few hours a day, 6 days a week helping the parents run the shop. I didn’t do much to be honest – all I remember is not being able to go out with my friends and having to serve customers, peel potatoes, sort out general frying foods and it wasn’t the most well paying of jobs. Plus I stunk of oil constantly. On top of that, being the only Chinese guy in the school didn’t exactly help with the bullying problem/beatings in school OR the fact we got stick for it when I got home. Windows got put through 7 times in a few weeks, my sister got chased down the street, my mum got spat on, dad almost got attacked… what a great place.

So now 8 years in from that hell hole, I’m back in Manchester and I’ve found somewhere where none of that matters. Where my skin colour, social status, yearly earnings, criminal record and bad habits aren’t taken into consideration. All that matters is that I work my balls off and graft. And everybody does the same in those short number of hours every day.We forget about our problems and fight.

And that’s why I do what I do. It’s not the norm but I don’t care. It’s my second home. Somewhere where I can be myself. Which is why I stress when I’m away from it.

It takes one to know one!

A stranger that is. So… my first post of 2009… and coincidentally, a year on from when I first started the blog… EXACTLY! Wow that’s some freaky shit and I didn’t even plan that shit! Another coincidence is that I’ve just booked myself a flight to go back to Thailand on 14th December til 18th January next year… but more on that later!

I’m still trying to get over returning on the same date as I started! I honestly didn’t mean for that to happen.

Since the last post, way too much stuff has happened, life got better… then worse… then good again… then worse. now it’s settled to a nice mediocre pace which I’m happy with although all I ever seem to do right now is sleep, eat, work and train… and eat more between all of that. I’m not going to get into what happened over the New Year, all you need to know is some people belong in your life, even if they play the tiniest role and some aren’t.

So I’m fitter, stronger and feel loads better in the gym. I’ve gone down to a nice 74kgs from 79 when I returned from Thailand. Although at one point, I went down to a sickly 72 and couldn’t find the balance between eating healthy and being neurotic. Now 74kgs, doing weights and sprints on a regular basis with a set routine has had my stamina through the roof (by my standards anyway) and my training in the gym a little more technique based and little less spaz like. It feels good!

I’m determined to finish the Thailand ‘Blog’ too, I say ‘blog’ in inverted commas because it’ll now be more like ‘a recalling of memories onto a website’… a diary. A flippin’ diary. A crap one at that because you already know how my life went, you just need reminding of the interesting bits that happened along the way. A flippin’ diary.

Anyway, it’s important I fill you in on the training as that’s the main basis of this blog stuff even though I didn’t mean it to be. On my return from Thailand, I competed in Next Generation’s Ground Control 2.0 Grappling Tournament in Liverpool… which saw me take a decision loss, a by into the Semi’s then to get triangled by the eventual Bronze medallist who Matt Inman beat in the tournament to follow to take Gold. Karma’s a bitch ain’t it?

The start to my lower weight came in the form of a 75kg category in one of the most. Sorry I mean THE most shoddily run competition I have ever been in. UMA. Run by, in my opinion, a bunch of self important tw*ts who want to take over the grappling scene using fancy abbreviations and terms for each other. One referee for the whole day, as in, the WHOLE day. He reffed from the womens lightest to the mens heaviest…. but good on him. He did a fantastic job of asking people to hold the mats in place and help relocate the mat area a few metres along after a leak appeared in the roof.

Team SBG at UMA

I think we took 4 golds…

Anyway… 75kgs. having never weight cutted or purposely tried to lower my weight for any particular reason I decided to stop taking on carbs and eating next  to nothing and for some reason I made it and have maintained and gone even lower since. But I need to stop eating chocolate before I sleep. It’s a bad thing apparently.

Ground Control 3.0 comes along and I get triangled and armbarred, then I up my intensity in training by doing more weights then Karl brings in the sprinting programme. That’s it up to now. I think. Oh and my memory isn’t what it used to be. Good luck with that ‘blog’.

Team SBG at Ground Control 3.0

We took 3 Golds 4 Silvers and a Bronze!

Just one of those days…

Those days where you got hardly any sleep, those days when you leave the radio alarm going for 15 minutes, those days where you feel like death when rolling out of bed, those days where when you step out of the house it’s wet and miserable, those days where you almost fall asleep at work due to the lack of sleep, those days where you wish that you had the balls to just walk out of work, those days where you realise you’ve got no money, those days where you dont want to be bothered, those days where you REALLY dont want to train, to go home after work, eat, shower, crawl into bed and sleep until the next morning because it’ll all be better then…

THOSE are the days you suprise yourself the most.

You could be gassing and so close to collapsing and jacking it in but something tells you to keep going, to drive, switch for the other leg, switch back to the original leg, posture, breathe, roll, stiff arm, shrimp, bridge, sprawl, defend defend defend.

You may get home a an hour later feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck but dammit… it feels goooooood….

Sawasdee Khrap

It’s hot, it’s humid and the training is hard… trying to keep your fluids up as well as keeping your hands up, shoulders relaxed and punches sharp proves quite difficult in the heat.

I’ve now been here a week or so and have met a few interesting people… as well as the obnoxious egotistical nobs who think a number of MMA wins gives them the right to bully and choose his gang… but you learn to ignore them, keep your head as well as your chin down and battle through the numerous rounds of thai pads and bag work.

So far, I’ve spent more time in my air conditioned room than explore but I’m slowly and surely coming out of my shell and meeting fellow fighters, especially in the last couple of days where a day at the local zoo always makes you smile… even when sat through the monkey show…

Training is almost the same as being back at home but more relaxed and longer. Once you get used to the heat and pace, you feel like you’re not cramming 6 hundred techniques in an hour… the trainers take their time with you, correct every single thing there is to correct to generate more power and more speed. Your foot could be slightly out when throwing a kick, they’ll move it to where it should be and then suddenly the boom of the Thai pad as you throw your hips into the kick like they ask you to sounds more and more attractive.

You start with 30 mins skipping or tyre bounce to warm up followed by up to 30 mins worth of running and stretching. You then wrap your hands and move to a bag or an instructor for 6 rounds of pad/bag work. You take a water break between each round after 10 push ups, unwrap your hands after pad/bag work and go into the technique part of the session where knees/elbows/blocking will take up around 30 mins. Then onto the sit ups, 200 sit ups followed by 50-100 push ups and maybe, just maybe, you’ll do 100-200 push kicks/knees/kicks just to sap that little bit out of you. Then more stretching, finish, grab a protein shake, shower then head off down to Momma’s to have a giggle and something to eat.

Time Out

After going down with the dreaded ‘Worm’, I’ve been off training for around 3 weeks now and I am now the most unfit I have been in a long time… even after having my operation on my cyst, I competed at Seni 3 days after and even though I did absolutely rubbish, I still did it!

I did some padwork last night and was breathing out of my ass within the 3rd round, my footwork was sloppy, shoulders ached from keeping my guard up and although I still had the power, it wasnt sharp, more of a meathead strength. I LOOK alot better from weight training in my time off but not much to be completely honest…. and now, I’ve come to a conclusion:

I AM GOING TO DIE IN THAILAND…