100% Martial Arts and Sport MMA Host GSP Seminar

View Gallery

By: Trevor Chaulk

Georges St-Pierre was in the nation’s capital, this weekend to spend time with his fans and teach them a few new moves. A big thanks goes out to 100% Martial Arts and Sport MMA, for giving hundreds of people the chance to personally meet and train with “Rush”, for some this was an opportunity of a lifetime.

The weekend event started off with a meet and greet at Local Heroes Bar & Grill on the Friday night. The event was well organized and turned out to be a great success. GSP arrived in Ottawa, and wanted to get to his fans right away, so he dropped off his bag at the hotel and proceeded to the restaurant. The meet and greet attracted about 500 people and Georges signed autographs until well after 2 am. He made sure that every last one of his fans had the opportunity to meet him and get his autograph. This event also raised money for the CHEO (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario), with the help of Business Depot, who took pictures of each fan with the future welterweight champ for him to sign! All the proceeds from these pictures went to the CHEO.

The next day, 100% Martial Arts and Sport MMA, hosted not one, but two very up close and personal Georges St Pierre seminars. The first one was a striking seminar. Georges taught 200 attentive fans everything from the superman punch, to the spinning backfist, to setting up different strikes as well as how to defend everything that he was demonstrating. The second seminar was focussed on grappling. GSP showed the next group of 200 “Rush” faithful techniques like the guillotine, how to properly work in the clinch and, my personal favourite, the complex grappling sequence that led to his submission victory over Matt Hughes! The crowd went absolutely wild when he was going through it.

The highlight of the entire event for me was when I was given the opportunity to ask the man himself a few questions. I first asked him what it was like to be able to take time out of his hectic schedule to come to Ottawa and be able to spend the day training with his fans. He told me that it is something he loves to do and that he does them a lot when he’s not training for a fight. I also asked him about some comments his trainer, Greg Jackson made in a recent interview with mmacanada.net. Greg referred to Georges as one of the best human beings he knows, and a man of insane integrity! Georges just laughed and told me that Greg Jackson is a much better person than he is, and that he still holds the same values and qualities as he did growing up. Another comment made by Mr. Jackson was that Georges sacrifices a lot for his team. When I asked St-Pierre about that, he immediately became very sincere and said that the Jackson Camp is like a family to him, and that he just returned from New Mexico, where he was helping Nate Marquardt prepare for his upcoming fight. For Georges, spending time and money to go help his training partners get ready for a fight was nothing, and he takes so much away from that himself – “we ride together, we die together…” – that’s the Jackson Camp according to GSP.

Something else that I was curious about was if our senseis and instructors got just as excited as all of the students for an event like this. I had a chance to talk with Shihan Bill Gatchell, known in the martial arts world as “Mr. Electric”. He has over 20 years of experience under his 5th degree black belt and he has also won gold medals in a number of competitions all over the world. Does a guy like this get excited like I do? Well the answer was absolutely yes! They relish the opportunity to train with the best in the game. Bill confessed that during the seminar, while Georges was demonstrating a triangle choke transition, he started seeing stars and was almost rendered unconscious. He laughed about how it would have looked – the head of a martial arts school, unconscious during a demonstration!

All in all, it was a fantastic experience! I would like to thank everyone at 100% Martial Arts, everyone at Sport MMA and especially the man himself, Georges St-Pierre, for an amazing weekend. I would also like to let the students at 100% know that you guys are in for a treat, because Shihan Bill and the team are planning to improve their already technical repertoire, with some adjustments learned from Georges’ style, so enjoy!

Just a final note to any aspiring martial artists in the nation’s capital, 100% Martial Arts offers training in jiu jitsu, kickboxing and MMA for all skills levels, with four schools in the region. Also, if you are an amateur martial artist that would like to test your skills in a safe recreational tournament circuit, check out the Sport MMA Championship.

Back