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UFC/WEC/PRIDE veteran
Jeff Curran Seminar In Knoxville a Great Success
MMA star and Pedro Sauer black belt, Jeff "Big Frog" Curran, hosted an incredible two-day seminar last week at Knoxville's Union Martial Arts.
Jeff, currently a Strikeforce bantamweight, brought his considerable experience and wealth of knowledge to a crowd that ran the gamut from white to black belts from all around the country.
Beginning with a two-hour Q&A session on Friday, Jeff explained his philosophy of jiu-jitsu, showed his favorite high percentage guard passes, and emphasized the importance of always sticking to the basics. He also compared and contrasted gi versus no-gi jiu-jitsu, and backed up his points with his personal experiences of training with masters of the game like Marcelo Garcia.
"Whether you train with the gi or without the gi, it's all jiu-jitsu," he said. "But I believe that to be good at no-gi, you must train in the gi. Look at Marcelo (Garcia), it was only seven years ago or so that he first started training without a gi. He developed his technique as I did and still do, in the gi."
Following up on the gi/no-gi theme, the Saturday session was split into two, 3-hour segments. In the first segment, Jeff expounded on the techniques he showed the day before, and got into some very elaborate sweeps and escapes using the gi.
The no-gi segment began with Jeff's favorite go-to pass for defeating the butterfly guard and transitioning into knee-on-belly before finishing your opponent with a choke from north/south. Following that, Jeff showed a brutal guillotine choke and how to stop your opponent from countering it. And just when everyone's attention started flagging because of the long day, Big Frog woke everyone up with a spectacularly tricky -and highly unlikely- armbar technique.
"I developed this armbar after I got a new 16-year-old student in my school," Jeff said. "He'd had no training, so I showed him the standard armbar with one leg behind the back and the other over the opponent's face. I also showed him the "hitchhiker" escape to get out of the armbar. So I start rolling with the kid, and I had him in an armbar five times, and five times he used the escape I had just shown him. Hey, I'm really trying to armbar this kid and he keeps escaping! It was kind of embarrassing! So I started wondering how to shut this escape down and get this kid, so I got one of my black belts, and we worked on some stuff. I came up with this counterspin armbar which ends up being much nastier than the first one. Needless to say, my student never escaped again!"
Union Martial Arts would like to thank Jeff for taking the time to visit and share his humor, his knowledge, and his hard-won experience with us. We can't wait to have you back, Big Frog.
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