Ronda Rousey Fights Eating Disorders - Matwork Clinic

**** SOLD OUT ***


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As promised, here are the details:

Ronda Rousey, UFC world champion, two-time Olympian, Olympic and world medalist in judo, six-time national judo champion and my darling daughter #3 is doing a clinic on March 9th. She has done exactly ONE clinic since winning the Strikeforce world title and right now she doesn't have plans to do any more other than this one.

What is it:
A two-hour clinic on matwork, judo and mixed martial arts. Limited to 30 people.

When is it:
March 9th , from 12- 2 pm.

Where is it:
Glendale Fight Club
601 S. Brand Blvd
Glendale, CA 91204

Why is she doing it?
To raise money for the Don't Throw Up, Throw Down fund to fight eating disorders. 100% of all money goes to the Didi Hirsch Clinic

Ronda is matching the money raised by the clinic with $5,000 of her own.

How much is it?
$200 Make your check payable to Didi Hirsch.

How can I get a ticket ?
Pay attention here: You need to pay in ADVANCE as we are only selling 30 tickets and they are only available at three places.

You can register and pay during judo practice on Sunday, March 3rd  2-6 pm at Millennia MMA, 8423 Rochester Ave. Suite 102 Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730. Or email Gary Butts at great4butts@aol.com  Don't ask the staff at Millenia because they don't have tickets and cannot help you.

Glendale Fight Club, 601 S. Brand Blvd, Glendale, CA 91204 They are open Monday - Thursday 4-8 pm
         Friday 4-6 pm and Saturday 12-2 pm

What is the third place?
I'll tell you later.

Why is it so hard to get tickets?
So we can be sure we don't sell more than 30. 

Can I just come watch and not pay? Can I just pay a spectator fee?
No and no. The only exception is that if you brought your CHILD, say your fifteen-year-old daughter, you can certainly stay and watch.

Can I tape the clinic?
No. The gym asked that we not have videotaping and since they donated  the facility we will respect their wishes.

Anything else?
Copies of our book, Winning on the Ground, will be available. We donated these for the clinic, so, again, 100% of the proceeds go to Didi Hirsch.

Free Rice Winners - Prize ideas?

I selected a sample from all of those who participated in the free rice competition. The more grains of rice you donated, the higher probability of winning.

ALL of the people who donated over 990,000 received a prize. It was supposed to be over 1,000,000 but one person was at 996,000 so that just seemed too close not to win anything.

Username             Grains Donated
InvincibleDK    10,408,030
svtjer                 9,231,590
xxdoc_holidayxx 6,405,340
Yariv                   6,404,670
louchristopher     4,034,320
Blackwater01     2,772,810
jesslittle             1,410,540
yingherng           1,161,690
Rabble_Rouser  1,084,970
norad2                1,032,530
DSL                   1,013,990
Alan260             1,006,320
rainmaker_            996,030

Originally, four people were selected who had donated over 100,000, four who had donated over 50,000 and three other people. However, there were only five people who had donated over 100,000 and it seemed unfair to give a prize to four of them and not the fifth, so I just put the fifth person down as a winner also.

Joz7
jamesj8354
box8
Ctron
trakandar
rolson3235
nicoleisaninja
Brad88
kshepard
Mg192
Pint86

If your name is above, please email me your address. Also, email me your t-shirt size and shorts size .

annmaria@7generationgames.com
If you donated over 1,000,000 and you have any special requests, please enclose that in the email. I cannot promise any special requests and Ronda is, understandably, taking a week off.  I know last time she had the Topps cards for the top two. There is a closet with cool stuff but I don't know how exactly she had planned to distribute it. There are t-shirts, shorts, a set of nice judo towels from Judo Unlimited, photos and I'm not sure what else.

Most of the t-shirts I have right now are small or extra-small. I think I have one large. I also have a couple of pairs of shorts.They are all autographed. If that is your size, you're going to give it to a small person or if  you are not going to wear it and don't mind the size, send me your address and I will get it mailed early next week.

The nice people at Fight Chix were supposed to meet up with me after the fight on Saturday about getting some extra large shirts but, as you can imagine, it was pretty CRAZY and we never did connect.

SO .... if your name is above and you could email me your information, that would expedite getting the prizes out quicker than last time.

A million points for you all. The total number of grains of rice donated between this time (almost 57,000,000) and the last two fights (31,500,000) is enough to feed about TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND PEOPLE.

In the unlikely event that you are interested in programming and how I fairly selected winners so that those who donated more had more of a chance, you can see the program here.  One winner had donated 580 grains of rice, so no matter how much you play, you DO have a chance (well not now, because the contest is over).

Random comments on fight night

Liz Carmouche in the post-fight conference said she thought she'd try knocking out some of Ronda's teeth and hope she could get her to tap. Of course, that did not happen. Although I don't blame Liz for trying, it illustrates what I've always said.

Techniques that just hurt your opponent but don't disable them through making them unconscious or dislocating a joint won't work on the really elite players. They WON'T tap just because it hurts. They will put up with the pain and when either they escape or the referee separates you, they'll just get even.

I think most women can relate to this story... I knew a young woman at the fight who had an awful ex-boyfriend who was a huge MMA fan. To further rub in the fact that he should not have been such a jerk to her, she wanted to get pictures with people like Chuck Liddell, Dana White, etc. I am not so much an MMA fan as a Ronda Rousey fan, but the seats in the front row have names on them. So, several seats for Ronda's family will have her name, and these seats next to us had Chuck's name. So, I asked him if he was Chuck Liddell and said,

"Hey, are you Chuck? I'm Ronda's mom. Would you mind taking a picture with this young lady?"

It turned out he was Chuck and no he did not mind but for some reason, my oldest daughter thought that was hilarious.

Did you know that Joe Rogan even broadcasts between the fights? I now know that because I went to ask him to plug in my cell phone and charge it up but he was broadcasting a fight.

My daughters also thought this was hilarious because HE'S JOE ROGAN which meant less to me than if he was Bob Rodriguez (president of the American Statistical Association, just so you know). However, since my youngest daughter was sitting with her friends and not under my watchful eagle eye and my grandchildren were with a babysitter I wasn't taking any chances on not being able to be contacted.

My second daughter, who is even less up on MMA/ UFC personalities than I am (apparently, that is, in fact, possible) kept pointing at random bald men in suits saying, 

"Is that Dana White? No? How about that guy?" 

When he showed up after the fight and gave Ronda a hug, her sister muttered under her breath, 

"I don't know why you guys laughed at me. He looks like every other bald, white guy."

And as far as arm bars,

1. Ronda did the arm bar just right in the end. I was very pleased to see her lock it against her body to break it away, because in our book, Jim and I emphasize that A LOT.
2. I thought (as did some others) that Ronda could have gotten the arm bar sooner. When she had Liz pinned and was hitting her, she could have transitioned to a bent arm bar, but when I asked Ronda about it and she explained her reasoning on it and it made sense to me. I have learned as a competitor, that a situation may look one way to the coach or spectators but the only person who really knows is the person on the mat. 

 Shameless plugs section  - you can find more cool stuff like this in the book from me and Jim Pedro, Sr. WINNING ON THE GROUND

for the Kindle, here
the Nook, here or
Sony or other ereaders, here

You can get it in the iTunes store, too. And it comes out on paperback in March, those of you into dead tree media can order it in paper back from Black Belt here 

CHECK OUT THE GAME BELOW FROM MY COMPANY. IT'S AWESOME. Click on the picture to go to the Kickstarter site and get a license for the game, a signed photo of Ronda posing for a fight scene in it , a poster and other cool stuff.

Free Rice Contest, Gaming Ninjas and Throw Up/Down

In case you have the enormously bad taste to NOT read my blog regularly you may not know that Ronda has a group RondaUFC on free rice.com .  Read carefully and learn how to win stuff:

First of all, free rice is an advertiser sponsored site that supports the World Food Programme, it is run by the United Nations. Every time you answer a question correctly, the advertiser donates 10 grains of rice. About a year ago, Ronda started a contest asking her fans to go to the site and play as part of a group. The previous group (RondaMMA) and the current one RondaUFC have raised a total of almost 85 MILLION grains of rice. That's a lot of hungry people. The top ten people in the group will win a prize - actually, it is the top 13 as of now because we said anyone who donated over a million grains would get a prize no matter what.

BUT you are not out of luck because we are also pulling 10 names at random. For every grain of rice you donated you get a chance to win, so the person who donated 600,000 grains gets 600,000 "tickets" but even if you donated 50, you do have a chance to win. You need to

1. Go to the free rice site.
2. Register (it's free)
3. When you play, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE PICKED RondaUFC as the group.

That's it. On my blog, I had said we would pick five people at random but Ronda told me that she had told people ten random winners, so ten it is.

Prizes - some people will get Ronda Knows t-shirts and Keep Calm and Break Arms t-shirts, all signed by Ronda and donated by the really nice people at Fight Chix.

Other people will get judo towels (they're nice) and t-shirts donated by the even nicer people at Judo Unlimited, also autographed.

I am not sure what the top two people get. Last time, she gave them limited edition Topps cards. There were a few that were a kind of misprint and Ronda owns all of them except for the two she gave away. She's kind of busy with the fight this weekend but I'll find out next week. I THINK I know what one of the prizes is but I don't want to say the wrong thing and then have someone disappointed.

Ninja gamers - All of you who said you supported our game but did not actually pledge, you have six days left  to go to the Kickstarter site and get a license for the game, a signed photo of Ronda posing for a fight scene in it , a poster and other cool stuff.
Answers to three questions about that:
1. What the heck did Ronda have to do with this? We wanted to make a FUN adventure game to teach math. Since Ronda plays games a lot (used to be a game forum moderator), we had her test everything before we released it and she contributed a lot of ideas for improvement. After the fight, she is posing as a model for some of the fight scenes.
2. Why are we doing the Kickstarter? My company received $100,000 to develop a beta version. HALF of the companies in that group will get a $450,000 grant to create a full-blown product. A big part of the selection process is "commercial potential" . So, if we can get a few hundred people to each pledge $15 to get a beta version of the game or $50 to get a full version, plus a photo of Ronda plus we'll sponsor a student in a reservation school, that shows a lot of commercial viability.
3. Where does the money go? How much is attorney fees, CEO salary, etc. ? Of the money we are raising, half will go to art work. Our company is good with programming but we need to pay people for the graphic design and animation because all of us but Ronda suck at art and she is busy punching people. Another 30% will go to documentation - writing up a user's manual, a wiki for tech support so if something doesn't work we can fix it right away or tell you what to do on your computer to get it to work (don't block pop-ups) and how, an FAQ for users to find answers to their own questions. The final 20% goes to game expenses. This includes mostly software used for game design and a few smaller expenses like a 3-D mouse. The CEO (that is me) is paid from other contracts. We aren't asking people in the public to back this project without a lot of skin in the game ourselves. We're not jerks.




Since this blog is getting really long and I have more to do before I head out to the weigh-ins in Anaheim ... just a little bit on the

Don't Throw Up, Throw Down  - Ronda has been pretty busy with this fight. As soon as it is over, we'll have more details on this. What I can tell you now:

Clinic with Ronda Rousey - March 9th at Glendale Fight Club
There will only be 30 or 40 tickets sold.
No spectators allowed except for parents of minors - if you have a 13-year-old you bring we're not going to ask you to leave!
100% of the money will go the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Clinic. In fact, checks will be made out to them.
No, Ronda has no other clinics planned. She is only doing this to raise money for the fund to fight eating disorders.



  Shameless plugs section

The book from me and Jim Pedro, Sr. WINNING ON THE GROUND is now out as an ebook.

for the Kindle, here
the Nook, here or
Sony or other ereaders, here

You can get it in the iTunes store, too.

And it comes out on paperback in March, those of you into dead tree media can order it in paper back from Black Belt here We expect that our book will be available in paperback by the clinic, and if so, we are donating copies that Ronda and I can sign. All money from that will go to Didi Hirsch as well

Behind the Scenes of Winning on the Ground: Part 1

On twitter, I promised that if our Kickstarter campaign hit $4,000 I would write about the behind the scenes of Winning on the Ground. Then I got busy and now our Kickstarter campaign is at over $10,000.

You can read all about the Kickstarter campaign for an adventure game here. Go to the posts section to read what it has to do with Ronda.

Behind the scenes

1. When we shot that cover photo, Travis (the guy on the bottom) kept almost passing out. It's a really tight choke. The photographers, as you can tell from the photos in the book, were real professionals and kept wanting to take multiple shots. Every few seconds, he would start to turn red (you can even see it in his face on the cover) and then blue. Finally, Ronda said, "Just tap when you feel yourself about to go unconscious and I'll let you up and we'll re-set after you get to breathe." That's why his hand is on her leg, so he could wait until the last minute so they could get as many shots as possible in without us having to revive him.

2. There is really no need for the striking in the photo. She already has him in an arm bar and a really tight choke. Ronda, the photographers and I had been arguing a lot that day and she was so mad she wanted to punch somebody, so in several of the pictures, with both Travis and Crystal she threw in some gratuitous punches.

3. We had to shoot the escape sequences over. Ronda HATES to lose at anything, so much so that when we did the escape sequences, she kept grabbing Crystal when she got half-way out and dragging her back. See photo of Crystal below NOT escaping as evidence. We finally had to switch positions and have Ronda do most of the escapes.

4. One of the escapes in the book is missing the last picture because we didn't notice until we were ready to go to press that Ronda had grabbed Crystal again at the last second to prevent the escape. She did it so fast and at the very end of the sequence. So, we just said something in the text about how you would keep turning out, since we couldn't really end the escape with a photo of Crystal being practically nailed to the ground in a pin.

5. Crystal actually did escape one of the pins and Ronda had the most perfect WTF?!! look on her face. Both Crystal and I were sorely disappointed that shot did not make it into the book. We still suspect Ronda threatened the photographer afterward.

6. Yes, the arguments. The photographers from Black Belt were amazingly good, as you can see from the book. The flip side is they wanted to do every shot from three different angles (at least!) and both Ronda and Crystal were losing patience. They kept asking me why I didn't tell the photographers what to do, since it was my book. The answer is that I am mature enough to realize that other professionals know their field better than me so I was not going to argue with them on that score.

7. The other arguments. It is no secret that Jim and I argued over just about everything in the book. Several people said to me, "You don't have to listen to him, it's your book." I am sure his people on the east coast said the exact same thing to him, in reverse. The truth is, it's OUR book and if he wasn't happy with a section, then I worked on it until he was because there is no way I would have finished it without him. I just have too many other irons in the fire. He also rewrote several sections because they weren't clear to me. As I told him, if I know you and I know a fair bit of mat work and I don't get what you're saying here then odds are great that the average person won't either.

WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO DISH ABOUT?
What I really think about Cyborg?
Who I think Ronda should fight next?
Judo versus wrestling versus BJJ?
Corruption in Olympic politics?
Untold Ronda stories (I'd have to clear these with Ronda first).

Vote in the comments below and when our Kickstarter hits $20,000 I will tell all.

 Shameless plugs section
 - you can find more cool stuff like this in the book from me and Jim Pedro, Sr. WINNING ON THE GROUND

for the Kindle, here
the Nook, here or
Sony or other ereaders, here

You can get it in the iTunes store, too. And it comes out on paperback in March, those of you into dead tree media can order it in paper back from Black Belt here 

CHECK OUT THE GAME BELOW FROM MY COMPANY. IT'S AWESOME. Click on the picture to go to the Kickstarter site and get a license for the game, a signed photo of Ronda posing for a fight scene in it , a poster and other cool stuff.

Simple little anti-groundhog drill

One reason I think a lot of people who are initially excited about judo eventually quit is that it gets to be like Groundhog Day - remember that movie where he woke up every day and had the same day over and over? So, the first time you learn a shoulder throw or even how to fall it might seem cool but after having had essentially the same lesson twelve times during the year, it gets old.

Here, pulled out of my bag of tricks is a really simple thing. Instead of practicing back breakfalls or side falls, have your partner grab both lapels and lower you down close to the mat, then, without warning, let go. You practice turning out of pins.

When Erin and Bradley are doing it in this video, I am telling him to let go but that's just for a demonstration. You really just let go whenever you feel like it.

Some older instructors are opposed to turning out of throws because they are worried people will get injured. My answer to that is:

1. People are probably going to try to turn out in competition anyway they're less likely to get injured if they practice it.
2. I'd rather get injured than lose (says the woman with a total knee replacement). Still, most the people I know who won far less than me got injured at some point, too, including people who just did kata, so I don't think it's fair to blame my competitive streak.

Yes, this is just a simple little drill that if you practice it a few times each takes about a minute.  Here's the thing, though - I have a very large bag of tricks, so I can pull out five new ideas every practice.

Shameless plugs - you can find more cool stuff like this in the book from me and Jim Pedro, Sr. WINNING ON THE GROUND

for the Kindle, here
the Nook, here or
Sony or other ereaders, here

You can get it in the iTunes store, too. And it comes out on paperback in March, those of you into dead tree media can order it in paper back from Black Belt here 

CHECK OUT THE GAME BELOW FROM MY COMPANY. IT'S AWESOME. Click on the picture to go to the Kickstarter site and get a license for the game, a signed photo of Ronda posing for a fight scene in it , a poster and other cool stuff.

Tomoe Nage Arm Bar- Hey, I didn't touch your leg

With the new rules in judo pretty much saying if you go near the person's leg while standing, we spent some time at practice today trying to figure out what is still legal. We went through several moves that Crystal, Erin and I happen to like and Oscar (Bradley's dad) took a video of all of the ones that we concluded were still legal.


Here is my favorite. You go into tomoe nage and when the opponent blocks you, throw your leg over and go into the arm bar.

Shameless plugs - you can find more cool stuff like this in the book from me & Jim Pedro, Sr. winning on the ground.

for the Kindle, here
the Nook, here or
Sony or other ereaders, here

You can get it in the iTunes store, too. And it comes out on paperback in March, those of you into dead tree media can order it in paper back from Black Belt here 

CHECK OUT THE GAME BELOW FROM MY COMPANY. IT'S AWESOME