As part of my visit to RGC Italia, this weekend I went to Firenze and Ferrara to teach seminars, and as usual, the classes covered specific topics. Saturday was time for the Firenze BJJ’ers to get more familiar with guard passes. I started defining important concepts on posture and fundamentals of opening the guard, and afterwards we worked on stand-up passes, from the most basic to more advanced ones. We had 22 people coming from Firenze, Bologna, Perugia, Cesena and La Spezia. In the end everyone sparred working on guard passes and defense.

On Sunday in Ferrara, the topic was sweeps when our opponent stands up. We worked closed and open guard sweeps, and in the end I trained with all of our students before grading some of them.

Matteo Tugnolli received his blue belt after his stunning performance in Modena (see post Montana International JJ Cup) and Matteo Mena got his second stripe on the blue belt. Stripes on the white belt were awarded to Ion Condei, Cristian Gessi, Simoni, Vlad and Enrico, signaling to them they are too very close to change belts.