After realizing that I had neglected my mount escapes, I’ve dedicated the last several weeks revisiting and refining how I deal with this position. My escapes weren’t terrible, but my preference for guard meant that ...
Posted on June 15, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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When I started BJJ I was 185 pounds. I have drifted upward since then (I don’t regret a single taco), and for the most part I have been considered one of the big guys in the room. As someone that has spent most of hi...
Posted on May 25, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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A little over two years ago, Hillary and I closed the small gym we had opened, sold our mats, and decided to travel as much as possible. 2 years and 20 countries later, we have more than accomplished this goal. Thank...
Posted on May 18, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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I got my black belt three years ago. For the first and second anniversaries of earning my black belt, I wrote blog posts about what I had learned in year one and year two. Time flies, but Panda Nation seems to enjoy ...
Posted on April 13, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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As I train more and more and I get a better idea of what “my game” is, I find myself using a similar principle more often. I like to call it “funneling.” What I mean when I use this term is getting to certain positio...
Posted on March 30, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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In an ideal world, we would all train at a place like Marcelo Garcia’s academy in New York City or Art of Jiu-Jitsu in California with a multiple-time world champion coach and plenty of world caliber training partne...
Posted on March 23, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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As Hillary and I were headed to Australia to meet our friend Chad and teach a few seminars, Winter Storm Stella was scheduled to hit the east coast. Our flight out of Philly was cancelled, which made us scramble to g...
Posted on March 16, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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Five years ago, I started Inverted Gear. It seems like yesterday I was ordering polybags and halfsheet labels on Amazon so I could ship the first batch of panda gis from my mom’s basement. A lot has changed since the...
Posted on March 02, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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I got to visit a lot of schools over the last 10 years. While every school is different, I feel they all tend to fall into three categories: traditional, formal, and informal. Before I go into my criteria for these c...
Posted on February 23, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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I am getting close to my 10 year anniversary with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Over the last year, I finally changed my mindset of how I look at my training, and started to think about longevity. I remember being a twenty-ye...
Posted on February 16, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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We need to talk about the berimbolo metagame, and we can look at how other competitions handle balance and metagame for some ideas of how to introduce more variety of grappling styles into competition.Street fighter ...
Posted on February 10, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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I played three different sports throughout high school – wrestling, track, and football – and I was fortunate to have amazing coaches in all three. Our football games (the kind with egg-shaped ball for our non-US rea...
Posted on January 12, 2017
Nelson Puentes
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