Your Martial Arts Experiences...

[IPON]

Shootfighting/BJJ Hmmmm...nasty ground combo.....COOL!!!!

[Madchat18]

I got my start in martial arts at a very early age. I started fighting my friends on my trampoline that I got for my 7th birthday. My friends would come over and we'd do the typical WWF wrestling matches for a while until people stopped letting the other guy pin them and actually started trying to choke or trying to hurt the other kid. I was always one of the best out there because I was alot taller and had longer arms and legs so I would choke like a little Rickson. I was doing the guillotine long before I knew what a guillotine was, I just knew that it hurt people and kept me from being hurt.

On my 11th birthday I got 2 pairs of boxing gloves and found out that my best-friend could beat the crap out of me standing so I started fighting with him alot. He would wear the gloves and I would be barehanded, he could punch me but I couldn't punch him. Several times he would knock my block off as I was coming in for a takedown. I didn't know about jiujitsu or anything so the guard was foreign to me. I just knew that I could choke him and I would keep going for all kinds of chokes. I also learned that the elbow is only supposed to move 1 way so I started doing crude armbars and armlocks. He had this move that would probably never work in real fighting but it hurt like a mofo. He called it his sleepless lol. The closest thing I can compare it to is a guillotine choke but instead of choking the neck, you "choke" the chest under the arms. It would almost always pop your back all the way down and make it where you couldn't breathe. He beat alot of us with that.

We started having tournaments shortly after my dad bought one of those HUGE video cameras. You know the ones, they are 3 feet long and weight 20lbs lol, We would do the submission fighting matches or boxing matches. Eventually we moved up to having 4 types of matches:
1. Boxing only
2. Submissions only
3. Boxing and submissions wearing the boxing gloves and
4. Full bareknuckle fighting with kicks and everything.

Since we were on a trampoline still the kicks could send you flying off onto the hard ground so they were rarely used. Surprisingly enough noone ever got hurt. We had bloody noses and bloody lips but never any broken bones.

The real change to my whole fighting philosophy of "Take them to the ground and choke the crap out of them" changed when I invited the new kid at school to one of our tourneys. His name was Shane Kelley and he was from Great Britain. He watched me beat a few people in the tourney ( we would always have big sleepovers so we could do half the tourney on friday and half on sat.) and asked me if I wanted to fight him. I was only a little tired so I told him to let me rest a little and I would fight him. We decided to do the bareknuckle match and I took my traditional flat footed palms out hands up stance and he took what I know now as a traditional Muay Thai stance. As you can see, this spells trouble for our hero :-).


I waited for him to come in and I was gonna shoot and take him down. Before I could even touch him, he landed a lightning fast roundhouse kick to my head, clinched me and started kneeing the $#!% out of my ribs. Sad thing was is that he told me afterwards that he was only going at 60% LOL, I hurt for a month after that beating, but I learned several lessons from that fight.

1 Never underestimate you opponent
2 Don't be one-dimensional
3 Kicks to the head hurt
4 Great Britain has good Muay Thai Kickboxers.

[nogibjjgear]

Since we are all talking about out martial arts experiences. I am new to nogi bjj and i am looking for a place to buy nogi gear and i was wondering if you guys could suggest me a place to get the gear from? I have found this site nogibjjgear and they have good stuff like really good stuff and i wanted to ask if anyone has tried buying from the site and had a good experience?