Feelin the Groove

Casey was under the weather last week so I had the chance to teach class last wednesday and worked on breaking people down in guard and freeing your hips to maneuver.

Step one: From closed guard pick a side. Get a sleeve grip on that side and a collar grip in the other side.
Step two: On the sleeve grip side put your foot on the hip and push your hips up and escape them to that same side while driving your collar gripping elbow straight down to the mat and stiffarming your sleeve grip across and to the mat.

Step three: Kick your leg up from their hip across their back.

You now have them pinned down pretty well and you have a hand free to work with.

From there we went over setting up a single collar choke + sweep, setting up the Kimura, and setting up an armbar.

I spent some time talking about how being flat on your back with double wrist control is not a good way to progress in guard, even if you feel "safe" there. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and catch on really well and now one of my friends who had been having a lot of trouble with his hip movement in guard is nailing armbars left and right.

Friday we briefly worked on an arm-in guillotine escape, then we rolled for over an hour in a huge gauntlet. I got to work against our two huge purple belts and achieved a moral victory in briefly unbalancing one of them.

Sunday was no-gi and one of our ammy fighters is getting ready for a fight, so no mercy. I got all kinds of sneaky on him and was able to sweep him a few times and finish a triangle and my trademark bicep slicer on him. I also warned him that he needed to free his arm when people spin to armbars on him from guard and he stacks them, but he didn't listen and my buddy with the improved hip movement armbarred him from guard EXACTLY in the way I warned him about.

I was also able to defend against our purple belts very well and start launching attacks. I feel like I'm making a lot of progress right now in just feeling peoples weight and feeling how techniques flow together. I'm starting to understand why a lot of the purple belts over at Bullshido don't post much in the way of technique how-tos or discussions. I'm hitting a point where I'm just flowing instead of planning my path. I've become increasingly willing to give up "control" in order to let my opponent move to create openings for me. I'm no longer looking to impose my game on my opponent, but letting the game reveal itself as we go along. I find it harder to analyze my technique post class now though because I can't really say, "I set out to work through this roadmap, I was able to do so X times out of Y attempts. That is Z more times than last class." My goals are so much more amorphous now. I need to start video taping the rolling portion of class more often so I can see WTF I'm doing.