Fun times, left work a little early to pick my wife up from our house and it ended up taking almost 3 hours to get out there and back due to detours and stupid drivers. Still, I made it to class on time.
Warmed up with some armbars, triangles, and situp sweeps from guard. Good technique heavy warmup just the way I like them. Technique today was a really really slick sweep/X-guard transition that I immediately liked.
The setup is your opponent in combat base, you are sitting back with the same side knee up. Put your foot on the inside of your opponents foot and then overhook their knee so that it crosses in front of your shin and locks their leg in place. Next you roll to the side and lift your leg, dumping your opponent sideways and forcing them to post on their hand. If you can reach their leg you can then come up to your knees and just push them over to side control. If not you can grab their posting hand using the marcello grip, feed your bottom leg through and scissor sweep. If neither of those seems to be working you can easily move under them and switch to X-guard to work from there.
We worked a variation where they get their weight down before you can lift the leg, so you wrap the lapel around their knee, feed it deep, and stand up. You lift the leg, ankle pick, and drive to side control.
Drilling we started in the combat base position with one person already starting with the overhook on the knee. I found that the best way to defend was to overhook their arm and grip the far lapel, then drive my weight down and to the back and sprawl. Me and Antony had some seriously acrobatic rolls using this sweep and several different counter attempts. I'm a fan of it for sure considering how hard it is to get people into my guard now. Most of them are willing to sit in combat base and work though, so playing angry koala on the leg should give me more options now and it fits in nicely with my X-guard push.
Sparring I rolled w/ JC, Katie, Antony, and a few easy rolls w/ Johnny since he's getting ready for a smoker. JC and Katie I try to let work most of the time. Antony is always a blast to roll with and this was no exception save for when I took an unintentional headbutt to the bridge of the nose. It bruised up a little, but no blood. Should be all healed up within a few days. Johnny is just like grappling a dumptruck. Takes everything I've got just to play static defense. Fun times though!
My first Beginners Class is tomorrow at 6pm. The current plan is to warm up with shrimping, situp sweeps and knee to elbow escapes, and some hip movement drills. Then work on how to move when escaping from mount and side control. A very movement heavy class trying to get people to coordinate their whole bodies together when they are working on things.
I like the idea of getting them to use their whole bodies. It took me a while to realize that "moves" don't happen with just your arms or legs. Your whole body is involved.
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