My updating is getting worse and worse! I just realized that I didn't even comment on last weeks classes at all. So enough of the silly pictures and on with the words.

Firstly Dion and Melissa are in the states for a few weeks and while they're there, they are trying to get to some different schools to roll. Dion unfortunately had a bad experience with one school and ended up sporting several stiches on a cut through his bottom lip. I'll leave it to him to fill in the details on the forum if he feels up to it.

With Melissa away, Nick has been taking the women's classes, but yesterday he came down with he same flu that has hit a few of the guys lately and couldn't make it. Which left me to take my first women's only class. Firespirte says that makes me an honorary lady? Not so sure on that one, but at least I did ok in the class. :)

MMA class: smaller numbers this week but still a good 14, still only doing bits and pieces though and it's starting to get a little frustrating. So I think well just have to start stringing some things together and also get everyone into hitting some bags/pads to get the striking up to a better standard.

Today we started lite rolling again, which seems to be impossible to do Gi-less, we then did some simple drilling side control which was bit more controlled. Finally we covered a few ideas on back control. Giving us full control of our opponent and allowing us time to sink the RNC.

BJJ Fundamentals: As always the Sunday class was huge! (Glad we added another row of mats) Sunday in the middle of Queens birthday and there are over 25 people in the class. Today we covered the mount controls we've done previously and a couple of the forced armbars from that position. But then we went onto a slightly harder version of the basic knee-ride armbars. This time instead of our opponent giving us their arms we had to force the armbars.

The first one went well, simply control your opponent and grab his near arm with both our hands and force it to his opposite shoulder. Spin our top leg over his head and apply the arm bar. ok: But then it all went bad.

From knee-ride we grab their far arm and spin to knee-ride on the opposite side and apply the armbar from there. Then as we become more proficient at it we simply spin into the hole we create when we force their arm to the mat on our side. This is the point that it went bad, the grips need to be sorted before we force the arm to the mat between our feet. As, by the time we spin to the other side if the grips are wrong we become tangled. Very funny to watch.

It was fantastic to have Ko on the mat again. A huge relief for me, also funny that he was the only Blue belt there. In a class of 25+ only 2 coloured was very strange.

Women’s only class: Only a few of the ladies today so it was a very intimate class but it gave me a great chance to see what each person was doing or doing wrong and offering some solutions.

I let them roll for a while then covered opening the closed guard, passing with knee through and 2 armbar variations from side control. Pretty good class but it made for a very long day. :)

Earlier in the day Matty and I ripped up the matt support on the street side and placed a new row of mats down, giving us another 10 odd meters of mat space, which we needed desperately. Thanks heaps to Matty for giving up his time and skills once again to help me out and also thanks to Peter and Shane for running around after us and helping. Also thanks to Alex for shifting the weights into a more orderly array and giving us a clear access down the side of the mats to the changing rooms.