MMA Beijing Training Report

I had the pleasure of trying out a class at MMA Beijing. The head instructor is Laurent (or Along as he's called here), and the classes include groundwork, MMA, boxing, wrestling.

The gym is beautiful, with a big area, mats on the wall, two heavy bags, a speed bag, wrestling dummies, tires... The only downside is that since the bags are in the middle of the rolling area, I kept bumping my head into one of them.

The class I tried out was focused on stand-up wrestling. We started out with a pretty dynamic warm-up, including one of those horrible drills where everybody hops around in a squat trying to be the last one standing.
We then did simple "swimming" and arm dragging drills. After a while of this we did some sparring.
Laurent's students were pretty good, and I could see they had a MMA approach to wrestling, using the thai clinch a lot and keeping an upright posture.

The same remark applies to their groundwork. It was very MMA-oriented, and Laurent admitted to being influenced by Erik Paulson and Catch as Catch Can. His ground style was an interesting alternative to pure BJJ, incorporating Catch, BJJ, and Judo techniques.

For example he used a very effective head and arm (kesa gatame) position (he told me he injured people with this by crushing their ribs, so he had a student do it to me instead), whereas most BJJ people will tell you it's not a good control position. He also twisted the wrist on the americana lock, and a few other small details that seem to come from Catch wrestling and Japanese style submission wrestling.

If you want to train MMA or no-gi, and especially if you're a student living in Wudaokou (the universities neighborhood in Beijing where Laurent has his gym) I encourage you to go pay them a visit.