11 October 2007, 00:05 in

Elvis Sinosic BJJ seminar

On Saturday, Elvis Sinosic came to our club to give a Brazillian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) seminar. Elvis is a professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter based in Sydney, Australia. He holds a black belt in Machado BJJ and has fought in the UFC. Besides being a big, strong guy, very experienced at martial arts, and a talented fighter, he is also a great teacher.

The following is a crude brain dump of what I remember from the seminar. These are just my personal notes (writing stuff down helps me remember) and probably won’t make much sense to anyone else. By the end of the seminar I had information overload and my memory is not the best. I have forgotten some things (hence the lack of detail on some techniques) and probably or got some things wrong, so feel free to correct me!

I had a quick roll with Elvis before the formal start of the class and most of the time he was just toying with me from his guard. Every time I felt like I was about to pass he would submit me. He got me with cross lapel choke a couple of times and this turned out to be a major focus of the seminar. We started at 10am and finished around 1pm.

First we did basic cross lapel choke from guard.

  1. Use your left hand to open their right side collar (i.e. your left side).
  2. Slide your right hand deep into their right side collar (palm up, fingers in).
  3. At this point most people with a little grappling experience realise you are trying to choke them and will attempt to sit up. To apply the choke, we need to break their posture and pull them down. With your left hand, grip their collar just below your right hand, in a baseball bat type grip. Once you have this grip, squeeze and lift with your legs as you pull down on the collar. This should allow you to pull their head down near your chest.
  4. Once their head is down, feed your left hand under your right hand into their left hand collar (i.e on your right side), again palm up, fingers in.
  5. To apply the choke, use your back muscles as if you are doing a rowing motion.

We then did a variant of cross lapel choke where you use the same setup, but when you feed your right hand into their collar, you put your thumb in and have your palm facing up. Doing it this way it seemed that you can get your left hand in with less effort and higher up their collar.

We also did a choke from guard that uses the opponent’s gi against them.

  1. With your right hand, pull their gi out of their belt and push it out behind them.
  2. Sit up and push the gi through under their arm with your right hand while reaching around and pulling it over their shoulder across their neck with your left hand.
  3. Then reach up with your right hand and grab it; this now forms one side of the choke.
  4. Now you feed your left hand thumb in behind their head (use their ear as a guide), and kick your right leg to your left while at the same time punching your right arm to the left.
  5. This will disrupt their balance to the left where you can position your right forearm and then pull them back to the middle and apply the choke.

Very tight and hard to get out of once it’s set up!

Next we did side control to knee ride to cross lapel choke.

  1. From side control (on your opponent’s left side in this case), control their collar with your left hand and their belt with your right.
  2. Kind of drive into them while arching your back slightly, like a sprawl, and from their jump up and place your right knee on their chest. I normally did knee ride with my knee on the opponent’s belly, but Elvis showed us to put the knee higher up more on the opponent’s chest, facing their chin. The same foot should be against their side for maximum control.
  3. Now that we have knee ride, we can apply the choke. I don’t remember the exact steps for this at the moment.

Elvis then showed us how to apply cross lapel choke from mount.

  1. Most grapplers are good at defending their necks from under mount. He showed us how to feed your hand into their gi collar quite low on their belly and then slide it up under their arms.
  2. Once you have your right hand in the collar, keep your wrist straight, and drive your lower forearm/elbow into their belly to lift their head off the ground slightly and make it difficult for them to move.
  3. After setting up the hands he advocates going to half side mount, which is a position that is basically halfway between normal mount and side mount.
  4. From here you can feed the left hand in and post on your head, to your right, and apply the choke.

Then Elvis showed us how to transition from knee ride to mount. This involves using your left hand to post right next to their head, preventing them from turning towards you, tucking your left knee and shin right into their side, and driving your right knee down to the floor. Once your knee touches the floor, flick the heel around and you are in mount. Then he showed us how to transition from mount back to knee ride. This involves driving your hips down and forward into your opponent and kicking your right leg back to almost touch your own butt and bring your foot down on the left side of their body (their right side).

Once we could do the transition from knee ride to mount and back to knee ride, we learnt how to transition from knee ride to mount and back while applying the choke. This seemed very tight and difficult to counter for the person on the bottom. You pretty much force them into only having one option as to how they react, and you are already ready for that to happen.

We finished with a bit of stand up stuff. First we did a chop and single leg take down (best to keep your head on the inside on their to avoid being guillotined). Then he showed us what do when someone tightly grabs your gi collars with both hands and straightens their arms, and simply holds on. This often happens in tournaments and if you don’t know what to do is very difficult to counter and can become a frustrating, time wasting, deadlock situation. What he showed us to do is choose a side (right or left), and bring your elbow on that side over their wrist and down (close to your body) and get the underhook on them that same side. From here you can get the back, sweep, throw, etc. This is simple to do and works well.

I had the privilege of being used as the dummy whenever Elvis was demonstrating the techniques. A bit painful, but it was good to feel the effectiveness of the choke and knee ride to mount transitions being applied properly! I have never been good at chokes and rarely pull them off in a wrestle, but I think today’s seminar helped me a lot.

I really liked it how, rather than just going through the steps of a technique like how it would be executed in the ideal world, he would often stop and point out what an opponents reaction would be at that point, and how to counter it. For example, his method of, when someone is in your guard, using a baseball grip on the opponent’s gi and squeezing and lift with your legs to break their posture will be very useful. Thanks Elvis!!

Here are a few words of wisdom I found on his website:

Winning is not the goal
The goal is to achieve the performance required to win
Winning is the outcome

Many dream of winning
Very few dream of performance
Very few win

You may wish to check out Elvis’ personal website, and his club, Sinosic-Perosh Martial Arts.

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