Last month we had the honor of hosting a seminar at the academy for Van Robertson. It was a really neat experience as the attendees were mixed with adults and child practitioners.
Van taught variations of the Bull Fighter (also known as the Toreando) pass, with a very reactive and systematic approach. The passes primarily dealt with the guard player maintaining both grips on the sleeves of the guard passer. Using both sets of grips (on the guard player’s pants and their grips on the passer) she anchored their guard and switched grips on the legs in a specific manner that killed their ability to make space. There was more to it than that, but that’s what I took away from it in essence, besides the specific techniques that she taught.
The seminar was a donation based event where all the money made was donated to a non-profit brazilian jiu jitsu program in Oakland called Guardian. Guardian Jiu Jitsu is a martial arts program that funds children to train under the age of 18 with donations from their adult members and community events. We were able to raise just about $400 for the event.
If you have the opportunity to train with or learn from Van in the future we highly recommend taking advantage of the opportunity. She is detailed, thoughtful, and engages with learners in a fun and active way.
Van now lives and trains in Auckland, New Zealand, but we are lucky that her parents live here and that she comes and visits when she is in the area!
Coach Aaron
Individual sports and martial arts are unique in that they often require an immense amount of teamwork to build a successful individual performance or development. This concept is unique in individual sports because in the heat of the moment only one person is responsible for the success and failure of the battle. However, to prepare and execute in battle it takes an entire team to do so. In life, just like in these individual sports, there are individual responsibilities that contribute to the success of the entire group. The ability to recognize your individual responsibility and contribute to the team is essential. This contribution might come in the form of being a leader, a follower, a silent voice of action, or mustering people together with your words and action. Needless to say we work on both of these skills on the mat at edh 
Only those that work together can be the strongest! Here, we aren’t just building grip and leg strength. At our martial arts academy in El Dorado Hills we don’t just teach technical and physical skills, we also teach skills of collaboration and working with others. This is a skill that is important on the mat but even more important in life off of the mat. One example of teamwork being taught is t
In December Jarrod led a community sock drive, collecting over a thousand pairs of socks for the homeless. He brought an awareness for a need that the community might overlook. We appreciate his attention to detail in noticing where different needs exist in our community and finding ways to fill them!
Javen has embraced learning both skills of training and implementing jiujitsu as well as the art of teaching and leading. In addition to jiu-jitsu, he excels in his academics at Oak Ridge high school and pursues his passion in music and the language arts in his spare time.
EDH Jiu Jitsu is adding two new classes during the weekly training cycle in 2018! We welcome students with a curiosity to learn and understand the grappling arts of jiu jitsu, wrestling, judo and the like. Our Brazilian