I’m really looking forward to this weekend. The Bravado BJJ tournament is being held on Saturday (13th) and the Canadian Sub-x is being held on the following day.

A bunch of my students have been training really hard and are excited to compete. They are looking great on the mats and should do very well. On Sunday two of our guys will be fighting in superfights. Veteran Grappler and MMA fighter Gavin “Heavy Metal” Hesson will be going up against Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu brown belt Brandon Fracassi in a no-gi match. Also, Mike Kocmarek, one of our blue belts, is matched up with another BJJ blue belt named Corey O`Dell. Mike’s is one of five team members on a Canadian team who are set to compete against a team of five from the United States.

It should be a great weekend, so if you live near Brampton, Ontario and you want to check out some bjj competiton here’s a link for more info.

http://www.bravadojj.cityslide.com/2008bravadoopen.html

I’m heading out tommorow to train some boxing, no sparring yet, probably just pads. I’ll let you know how it goes…

I didn’t get much training in today, instead I spent the first half at the day at the veterinarian hospital with a dog eye specialist. My wife wanted to get a dog a few months ago, and I kind of just go with the flow, so I said sure…whatever. I didn’t know she wanted to get the biggest kind of dog there is. The dog is only 5 and a half months old and already weighs 90lbs. It’s a female english mastiff. If anyone has any mastiff tips, throw them my way since I’ve never had a dog/small horse before.

Well anyway the vet charged $285 for the visit and now we have to pay for a $1700 surgery procedure to fix her eyelids. I think I might have to raise my fight purse prices now .

I did manage to get into the gym a few hours ago to train in an mma class. Most of the time I train my stand-up, groundwork and wrestling separately but on Mondays and Saturdays I usually get to mix’em all together. In tonight’s class we worked on some double leg takedown variations, a few kicking combinations and worked on some ground work . It is awesome to be back on the mats working up a sweat. The concussion had prevented me from doing anything strenuous a long time which really sucked.

Well, time to get some sleep…

The last year and a half seems to have gone by so quickly but then again it feels like forever since I’ve been able to do what I love to do, competing in the best sport in the world, mixed martial arts. In a few months it will be 2 years since my debut fight in the UFC. Due to some bad luck with injuries, my next fight has been put on hold for a while now.

After my fight with Josh Koscheck, I was set to fight Kuniyoshi Hironaka on an April UFC fight night card. I had to pull out of that fight when I tore a muscle in my lower back while kickboxing. My back took a few months to heal.

I immediately got back to training in preparation for the next opponent that the UFC gave me, Chris Lytle. My camp and I were pumped when we found out that I would be fighting Chris at UFC 73 in Sacramento. Chris is a tough, experienced fighter who likes to battle and never holds back, so I anticipated an super exciting fight, one with great potential for us to win the fight of the night bonus check . Also, in nearly 50 fights, he had never been tapped out or knocked out, and that motivated me to work hard to become the first to do either.

While training for this fight, I hit my head on the mat while rolling and sustained a concussion, which turned out to be the worst injury of my career. For any of you out there who have dealt with the lingering effects of concussions, I don’t have to say any more, you already understand what I had to go through. I’ll definitely talk a little more about it in future posts for those who have never had a bad one.

Well, enough about the past, I am back training now and will keep you updated (I’ll try to post a few times each week) on how things are going…