Shinya Aoki v. Jung Bu-Kyung

Speaking of the Dark Side ...

Shinya Aoki Unrepentant Arm Breaker Coming to Strikeforce for Gilbert Melendez
Great pre-fight coverage compilation from the good people of Bloody Elbow

AOKI!!!!!

In mixed martial arts, a fighter is rarely criticized for being a knockout artist. Certainly not from the average MMA fan, who loves a brutal knockout as much as any boxing or K-1 fan.

But have a fighter win the vast majority of his fights by submission and the cry will not be long in coming: "yeah, well wait until he fights some real competition. You need more than just jiu jitsu to win a fight against anybody good."

Of late, Demain Maia - whose string of submission victories in the UFC has been among the most impressive - has been the target of this ridiculous adage that, like all adages, is right until its proven wrong - again.

So with that, let all of us who love jiu jitsu stand and cheer the career of Shinya Aoki, a "submission first, second and last" fighter with very little in the way of stand-up striking prowess who many wiseguys thought would get battered by, wait for it, the "heavy-handed wrestler" Eddie Alvarez at the K-1 Dynamite New Year's Show in Japan.

Dynamite!! Aoki Claims WAMMA Crown

As one fan put it in a recent message board post: "First I thought Aoki would get crushed by Hansen in their first match; instead, he gogo'd him.

Then I thought Aoki would be beaten down like he owed money by J.Z.; instead, he got his back and almost omoplata'd him.

Then I though Alvarez would KO Aoki with the quickness; instead, Aoki heel hooks him.

Jiu-jitsu's still enough!"

Works for me. Parabens Aoki!

Tuesday Night Training

The training camp for Revolution 11 08 08 began yesterday, with a moderate LSD3 session on the treadmill (385/120). Tonight, was the first mat training of the camp.

A good night. Very Monday-like insofar as the warm-up was pretty much some hipscapes across the mat. We drilled for awhile: spider guard triangles, left and right, and one of Rodrigo's patented moth guard sweeps.

Here's how the sweep works from one side. From tight moth guard, slide your right leg across to the left so that your foot hooks back against his ribs.

Extend your left shin out to the side. You've got a grip on his sleeve with your left hand, and you're controling his right arm with that sleeve and knee/shin pressure.

As you swing your hips out to the left to extend the shin, dive and underhook his near leg with your right arm.

Extend the shin, lift up with the right leg "backwards" hook, and lift with the underhook to finish the sweep.

As with most sweeps, you want the guy to be coming in toward you. So wait to feel his pressure coming forward before going for the sweep.

We did some specific guard/pass guard work that is always nice. I wasn't as persistent in working my standing passes. But I did do a fairly good job of turning full guard passes into half guard passes. And I feel pretty confident in attacking the half guard. I've got a basic gameplan - nothing special. But I follow it like religion. And more often that not - and certainly against comparable opponents - it works.

Free sparring was a blast. 10 minute rounds. I rolled with Clint, Rodrigo, Stephen, Casey (who I haven't seen since the tournament in July) and then a good sized white belt whose name (Ben?) escapes me right now.

A black belt. Two advanced purple belts. One intermediate purple belt. And a white belt who had a couple of pounds on me to say the least. That's the kind of mix that's going to work wonders if I can keep at it for another 10 weeks.

I was thinking about that while I was in the shower after training. How many of my opponents in November train with - actually get on the mat and roll with - guys with Rodrigo's skill? Our purple belts regularly place at the local events - when they don't sweep the division. Do my opponents train against purple belts as tough as Casey, Stephen and Clint?

My bet is that they don't. Not regularly, not three times a week, they don't.

This is what I need to leverage. Not just the teaching - and certainly not just the endless hours plotting and planning my jiu jitsu. I train with some of the best guys (and gals) in the Northwest. I need to remember that when I'm thinking ahead, starting to get nervous about my imagined future opponents with their Aoki-like flexibility and Lesnar-like power.

There's nothing I'm going to see in November that I haven't seen done better right down the road in SoDo. Remembering that will go a long way toward keeping things in perspective as competition time nears.

Best BJJ in MMA

One of my favorite discussion topics is: which fighter has the best jiu jitsu in mixed martial arts?

Eddie Bravo (love him or hate him) has a great preface to his book, Jiu Jitsu Unleashed. While he is mostly talking about his own evolution as a jiu jitero, he is also talking about the evolution of jiu jitsu in mixed martial arts. Sure, Bravo is known as a fairly aggressive anti-gi guy (gi agnostic is probably more accurate and more fair), but many of his concerns as a jiu jitero are those that many of us (read: me) struggle with.

How do you break somebody's posture and keep it broken? How can small guys with short legs utilize the closed guard? How can you become comfortable about going for broke with submissions when you are afraid your game from the bottom is not up to par?

One of Bravo's best observations is the struggle that many jiu jiteros have with the "explosiveness" of wrestlers. While Bravo talks about his rubber guard, for example, as a solution in no gi to the absence of the collar and sleeve as grips, for me the rubber guard is a fantastic tool against wrestlers' "explosiveness" as well as larger fighters with good posture in the closed guard.

Anyway, I say all that to say this: Pride lightweight contender Shinya Aoki has done a better job of using the rubber guard in mixed martial arts than anybody I've ever seen. Moreover, as the highlight below points out, Aoki has a solid non-rubber guard game, as well as a very good game from the top (including takedowns). From what I've read, Aoki has a lot of judo experience, but has been focusing on jiu jitsu more of late. I believe he trains under the legendary Japanese fighter Yuki Nakai, who battled the bigger Rickson Gracie more than a decade ago (a fight that is chronicled in the documentary, Choke.)

So, does Aoki have the best BJJ in MMA? I gave Matt Hughes a lot of credit for being the reigning submission king of the UFC. For a while, nobody in the UFC was submitting their opponents with more regularity than Hughes. Over his 40-5 career, 56% of his finishes (and Hughes finished 32 of his opponents) came by submission.

But jiu jitsu isn't just submissions. It's about a philosophy of succeeding in conflict. Submissions notwithstanding, fighters like Hughes (and Sean Sherk, another wrestler who has submitted a number of opponents) are not submitting opponents from the bottom with any regularity--if at all. And while I hate the notion that jiu jitsu = fighting from the bottom, the ability to successfully defeat an opponent from a "disadvantageous" position like the bottom is one hallmark of the art.

Which brings me back to Aoki. I don't know if he's got the best jiu jitsu in MMA right now. But he's got a lot of grapplers thinking about it. I've started to wonder if there aren't two really successful approaches to the guard in mixed martial arts: a closed guard game that favors the taller, more long-limbed fighters, and a rubber guard game that requires exceptional (but not necessarily genetically exclusive) hip flexibility. Along with BJ Penn, who often works for omoplatas and gogoplatas from the guard, Aoki seems to fall in that latter category.

And as somebody with a body type that is almost perfectly midway between BJ's and Shinya's (and Bravo's, for that matter), I won't pretend that the rubber guard--and what I'd need to achieve it--hasn't gotten my attention.

But enough about me ... Enjoy.