Written By Guillaume Huni, BJJ black belt and head instructor of Kimura Academy in Serbia.
I took a quick plane ride from Belgrade, Serbia to Zurich, Switzerland to compete at the 2016 IBJJF Zurich Open last weekend. The competition was on Saturday (Gi) and Sunday (No Gi), but I had decided too arrive earlier, on the Thursday so that I could take part in a training session at the famous Frota Academy and fine tune my Jiu-Jitsu with some of the instructors there.
Frota Academy is a state of the art 850 square meters facility filled with high end training equipment as well as world class instructional that will help you have the best development as a fighter and motivate you to sink everything into having a healthy lifestyle. The Frota Academy is ranked among the most beautiful BJJ academies in the world.
While the instruction is mostly provided by Augusto Frota, Alfred Sutter and Stefan Ruegg you should seriously check out the list of world class players they’ve hosted in the past. Some of the guys that provided their guidance to Frota students were:Braulio Estima, Gezary Matuda, Rodrigo Miotauro, Rodolfo Viera, Leandro Lo, Marcus “Buchecha” and Gilbert Burns “Durinho”. And that was just in this past year! https://frota-team.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Who-Inspires-you.jpg
Augusto Frota has an impressive network of MMA and BJJ contacts across the world and his student are truly spoiled (in a good way) as they have world class instructors and competitors teaching and training with them every month.
When I was there, they had no other than 5x world champion Braulio Estima, Copa Podio competitor Diego Borges, MMA fighter Andrezinho and more black belts covering the classes for the week.
Diego Borges showing positions. Photo: Joshua Halvatzis, GoLive
I was picked up from the airport by my friend Stefan Ruegg. He was nice enough to wait for me as my plane from Belgrade was over an hour late. We got just in time for the class which was lead by Braulio Estima! The atmosphere was very good, and everybody there was very friendly and welcoming. Having a class led by Braulio is amazing as he has a real detailed and concept based approach to teaching Jiu-Jitsu. He started us off with a basic guard passing drill to get us warmed up. We then transitioned to how to deal with the guard pull. I had learned this technique before, but this time Braulio added another detail that I had never taught about.
Photo: Joshua Halvatzis, GoLive
We then saw two paper cutter chokes demonstrated by Copa Podio top competitor Diego Borges. The detail on how to put extra pressure and how to force the opponent to give you the choke, was priceless!
After technique was done, we went on to positional sparring and worked on side control. This is the best part were you can really apply the lesson of the day.
The last 20 or so minutes were spent on live rolling. I was an honour to roll with both Braulio, Diego Borges and the other team mates.
If you’re ever in Zurich, I highly recommend Frota Team for a great roll and great atmosphere.
Augusto Frota interview for BJJEE:
