Interesting fact about buying a Shoyoroll in Palma compared to the United States. It is crazy expensive, and I mean crazy expensive! A Shoyoroll kimono in America costs about 170ish US dollars after taxes and shipping. At the moment the current conversion rate for the Euro in Spain is around 1.4 to the U.S Dollar. This would translate the 170 dollars in to 238 Euros. Not to bad right?  Well unfortunately there are different shipping regulations and taxes here. After shipping costs and taxes the final cost of a Shoyoroll kimono shipped to Palma comes to be . . . *drum roll* . . . about 2000 Euros!!! I know, its crazy! Anyways . . .

Today I finished another training session at ABAMMA in Palma and the overall experience has been fantastic. The guys there are very friendly and have a close knit atmosphere.

First day on the mats in Spain

When I arrived the first day I was greeted by Javi which was who I had talked to over the internet the most. He gave me a big hug when I walked in and showed me around the gym.  Everyone was very respectful and friendly, each one making it a point to come up and shake my hand once I was on the mat.

Did the language barrier cause a problem when teaching techniques?

After the class began we did some normal warm up drills and then jumped into some technique. As I started to teach I was a bit nervous at first. I was thinking about the language barrier and I thought of the lack of communication I would have while showing the moves. Really though, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be. While I had worried that my inability to vocalize an accompaniment for the visual instruction would cause the students to miss out on valuable details. This turned out to be no problem because everyone was attentive, possessing proficient ability and the guys took hold of the movements very easily. I made sure move around the mat to manually make the necessary corrections once they were drilling the techniques. All in all, I believe it rather smoothly overall.

 Time to roll!

After the technique portion of class we began the rolling. Like I suspected, since there is a high ratio of competitors, everyone rolled very hard. Not hard in a “spaz” sort of way, but rather by putting forth a lot of effort into the rolls. I started the rolling session with Javi and then went with anyone that wanted go. During the first day of training I didn’t do any submissions. I did this because it was my goal to train and make friends while here, not to prove I’m the best and crush every person I rolled with. Instead, I would keep a fast pace and focus on a few specific movements during each roll and would release any submission I had secured. I guess you could think of it as a sort of “catch and release” style of rolling. I would give whoever I was rolling with an opening and then move from there, trying to execute my techniques. I do this with my students at home as well. This style of rolling offers a few benefits in that it allows me to get a lot “active drilling” on moves I am perfecting, it gives a great cardio workout because we keep moving continuously, and I get to help further the less experienced student by offering them opening and giving them opportunities to execute techniques . Once we reached the end of class steam was coming off my body and my gi was significantly heavier from soaking up the perspiration during the training.

A great first experience at a BJJ gym in another country. I will post more about the training here and wrap things up a bit. I also plan to post a little video up as well.