Alban Balliu – Street Applied Wrestling Concepts

In this program we introduce UC’s most Senior Instructor outside of Lee Morrison, Alban Balliu. Alban has been with Lee since the very early days of UC, and is from the First Generation of UC Instructors. He has a vast background in Combatives training, having pretty much trained with anyone who’s anyone worth talking about in this field. He has pressure tested with the best of them, and accumulated his fair share of ‘live’ street experience over the years.Outside of that, Alban is an accomplished strength athlete and competitive wrestler in both Free-style and Greco Roman. His knowledge of this subject is huge, both as a competitor and from a conditioning aspect. Alban understands clearly that all means of grappling ‘in the street’ are strictly filed under secondary tools – IMPACT being the primary choice in the street if avoidance and escape are no longer an option. With that said, both Free-style and Greco contain nuggets of pure gold when combatively integrated with gross motor IMPACT and explosive takedowns from a pavement perspective.As with all my top students, I gave Alban my time and guidelines to functional Combative training as far as my knowledge would allow, then I told him to cross-train and to seek attributes from other methods without the clutter of accumulation. His favoured direction was strength training and ‘real’ wrestling, seeking out the people with real knowledge of the this great close quarter staple – from some of the top Bulgarian coaches and competitors such as Boris Sabotinov, to UK SDF legend Dave Turton.This program is by no means a substitute for strategy – more of an enlightenment to the fact that if the ATTITUDE is right, then additional concepts certainly have their place within the realms of Combative functionality!