Talking 'bout a revolution

The dreaded lurgy has manifested itself in my lungs and I'm hacking great plumes of nasty stuff at the moment. It makes training very very difficult as I feel practically asthmatic with breathlesness. It has lasted several weeks now. Of course my 'man flu' is virtually pneumonia and I'm obviously very brave to be on the mat at all.
Anyhoo, one of the good things I like about the tuition I get with Nick at the Mill Hill BJJ Club is that he usually proceeds a technique with an anecdote or story about how he came to learn the technique. Last week he spoke at length about his private lessons with Ricardo de la Riva Goded. Nick wanted to learn the eponymous de la Riva guard, and the man de la Riva himself said, nah, I've seen you roll, you need to learn defence first. So with that, he then spent the next hour learning, according to Nick himself, a series of defence techniques that fundamentally changed his game forever...and the joy for us, was that Nick then went to show us what those techniques were. And I've used those defences myself and they really do work.

Oi Meerkat, what did de la Riva teach that was so damned good? Ask Nick if you really want to know, or better still, fly out to Brazil and pay for a private. Anyway, my point was that it's not what you say, it's the way you say it that counts. Having lots of little stories, anecdotes, funny and/or remarkable incidents to accompany a technique can really help numbskull students like me remember them a tad better. It also underlines the breadth of experience that Nick has and is so willing to share with us.

So there you go. Back to the Lemsip, Vicks and BJJ videos on youtube.