GUSTAVO MACHADO ALMOST-SEMINAR @ KREATION BJJ

Over the past weekend, Gustavo Machado was in Singapore to give a couple of BJJ seminars at Kreation BJJ, for both gi and no-gi. If I'm being completely honest I wasn't so hot on going - not because I didn't want to (because I did) but because I was just feeling fatigued and slightly emotionally drained after the recent competitions and just wanted a quiet open mat session at KDT.

As it turned out, my sister-in-law needed to drive to Singapore on Friday night. I didn't want her to go alone so I volunteered to drive. Her plan was to come back Saturday night so I thought, "OK great, this means I'm in town anyway, so I may as well go to the seminar". It was set for gi from 2-4 and no-gi from 4-6.

Then, just before we leave KL I check the details again. Apparently I managed to read "Sunday, 5th October" as "Saturday, 4th October". I don't know how, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'm feeling kind of bummed about it as we're all still leaving town Saturday night, but when I check with Aziz, there's a BJJ class anyway from 2-4 at Kreation so I may as well bring my gi.

Fine, so we get to Singapore. Friday night passes without event and we're on to Saturday. I had printed out a bunch of Google maps so driving to Kreation was also pretty merciful. I get there and I say hi to a lot of familiar faces. Aziz and Melvynna were there and I met Christiano, their resident black belt. Gustavo is also walking around and I get introduced to him.

We started with a cardio warm-up that was way more intense than I'm normally used to for BJJ. Fortunately it was still much easier than one of Vince's conditioning classes, or Adam's style of warm-up, so I was fine. We did some basic self-defense stuff and that's more or less all I remember about the class. I know we did one or two BJJ techniques as well but they just escape me right now.

Which is fine, as the main reason I wanted to attend the seminar was not to see what he teaches, but how he teaches it. It's always interesting for me to check out different coaches and their styles.

At the end of class we started rolling. I got to roll with Aziz, Christiano, Kon and Gustavo, among others. It was a lot of fun! It was my first time rolling with all of those guys, except Aziz and it was a really interesting experience. Particularly fun was rolling with Kon and Christiano, I really like those guys.

The only thing was except for the roll with Gustavo we kept getting interrupted by people who were getting too close to us. As it so happened, twice the normal number of people showed up and it was pretty packed. I got a photo taken with Gustavo but it wasn't with my camera so I'll need to wait for that as well before posting.

Finally, after I left I drove over to the Fightworks Asia gym to have a look, as they were pretty much just down the road. It was more or less the end of the day for them and I had a chat with Sascha, who runs the place. He was cool to me, he showed me around both floors of the gym and we talked for a while.

Overall it was a really edifying trip. The drive itself was quite the experience, as was the causeway. Rolling with the guys at Kreation was always going to be fun. I learned a lot this trip and I'm glad I made the drive!