UGA Grappling Club 12/2

As my wedding approaches the days are starting to blur together. It's hard for me to remember what days I have class and what days I don't.

We had about 17 people show up for the club this time around, including three new ones. I started out with a quick review of the two basic mount escapes, the Upa escape and the knee-to-elbow escape. Then I paired them off and had them work the escapes back and forth starting with very little resistance and working up to full resistance, with an emphasis on combining the two escapes. After about thirty minutes of that I set up 5 "rings" and started king of the hill with mount escapes. One partner starting in mount and having to submit, the other person just having to escape or regain guard. I made sure to emphasize that the TOP person actually has the harder victory condition in this one, it being much more difficult to submit someone that it is to just regain guard most of the time.

I rotated in a few times for fun, then we did half an hour of rolling. One of the new guys has a couple of years of Judo/BJJ from Middle Georgia Judo and wanted to roll with leglocks in play. He went for an early heel hook but didn't even come close to having a grip on it. I threw on the saddle and heel hooked him, then heel hooked him again when he tried to pass my guard standing, then knee slicered him when he put on the body triangle while I was in his guard.

After that I played with some of the other guys, one big athletic guy just absolutely blew my grip while I was trying to control him. The most trauma I've felt in my hands in a while, even worse than when I'm playing spider guard all night.

Continuing my situp sweep work I started just diving for the kimura from guard, then when my opponent tucks his arm, I finish the situp sweep. Worked extremely well and I intend to employ it further in the future.

It was a good class and almost everyone is making decent progress. I'm still encouraging them to come join Megalodon if they are serious about jits though.

Jiujitsu 11/28

No-Gi tonight. A lot of lightweights in the class tonight, Antony was back which is great. We worked more side control escapes, all pretty much related to the ones we worked for Gi on Friday.

We also did a lot of escape drilling, which I always enjoy. Then we worked on some Knee on Belly attacks. Spinning Armbar on the farside arm, a modified Kimura, and a straight armlock.

I spent the night working on my triangle chokes since I've been neglecting them in no-gi. Got them from all kinds of places. Comboed them well with other things including armbars and sweeps. I'm really feeling like my jiujitsu is smoothing out. I transition between defense and offense better and move among my various attacks with less hesitation.

Favorite combo of the night: Arm Drag -> Whose your daddy sweep -> Mounted triangle with the arm trapped for extra pressure.


General thoughts on the way my game is changing some. I now go for the single leg takedown even from knees or butterfly guard or whatever. If I get a chance to snag that leg and stand up to execute the takedown I will take it every time. It's starting to become a highly effective sweep for me when people post their knee up in combat base for me to just latch onto it and stand up. I switched to this after reading about Ryan Hall changing his game away from some of the crazier techniques and how the top level game was all about getting that single leg. I watched a bunch of videos and saw how Marcelo and other guys at the top would indeed grab that single leg and score over and over again from wherever they could get it. So I've been working to add that into my game and it's been helpful so far.

JiuJitsu 11/26

My car decided to crap itself on the 23rd which was just a huge pain all around, but I still made the friday class. Just Four of us, Casey, Coe, me and that same newer wrestler guy. We worked side control escapes including a couple of slick ones that I hadn't seen before.

I learned that Coe and Casey haven't gotten any lighter, but I'm not making as many mistakes against them now. I did manage to reverse Coe from side control which made me happy, and I put up a good fight against Casey, which is about all I can ask for.
My neck and right shoulder are both tweaked though after Coe kicked his leg up and managed to catch my face and peel me backwards off of side control, I felt it coming up and tried to duck forward and didn't quit make it, so super painful.

The new wrestler guy is still ignoring hip control in favor of trying to pin the shoulders, once he gets over that he'll improve a lot almost over night. His top control is already good and tight.

I'm making good progress with armbars from the top, and grabbing both armbars and triangles from more places now, but my situp sweep progression just isn't there. I just can't get most people into my closed guard long enough to try it in rolling. I'll keep working it though.

Jiujitsu 11/19

Relatively small class, Darnell, Me, a visitor from the Alliance school in ATL and a just a few other guys showed up. Darnell decided to show some helicopter techniques for fun, so we started with the monkey flip sweep from feet-on-hips spider guard, then a variation from closed guard, then helicopter armbars. Fun stuff.

So many of our guys are already so gun-shy about moving towards me in guard that I don't get a lot of opportunity to play with this kind of thing, I spend most of the time chasing them down to get some kind of grips.

Mostly I just had fun. Practiced the breakdance pass a few times, worked from the bottom a bunch, worked on my combos, and generally just chillaxed and enjoyed the game. It was a fun class. I might do a quick video on the breakdance pass tonight if I go to No-Gi.

UGA Grappling Club 11/18

Broke away from boring jiujitsu, but still got a lot of drilling in. I taught Scissor Sweep and the basic guard break and pass and had everyone get in 25 reps of each. Then I put everyone in groups of 3 for specific sparring from guard with the top guy just having to pass and the bottom guy just having to sweep to win. So that got everyone some live experience with the stuff we had just gone over.

We had a couple of new folks in the class, one who was a wrestler which was fun. Once he adjusts to the small differences between wrestling and Jits he'll be awesome.

I wasn't really rolling since my left arm is still a little gimpy, so I wanted to preserve it so I could make class today, so I just worked on some combos as per the Roy Dean purple belt DVD. I ran through Omoplata -> Gogplata -> Armbar, and Triangle -> Armbar -> Giftwrap/flower sweep, as well as Scissor sweep -> Triangle -> armbar -> flower sweep, and Scissor sweep -> kimura/kimura sweep. I'm getting smoother with my combos which makes me feel good, but I still have issues making the flow happen against guys with good top pressure sometimes. I tend to go into glacier mode and latch onto one limb and slowly work my way to a sweep or sub, which I guess is fine, but isn't as smooth and flowy as I'd like it to be.

JiuJitsu 11/14 No-Gi

I made the No-Gi class for the first time in a while. Anthony is back from doing his play and was worried that he would be rusty, but he was only out a couple of weeks and hasn't lost a step.
Casey asked if anyone wanted to work on anything particular and I called out for the Situp Sweep. He made the point that you really have to distract your opponent with something before you can go for it since they have to be sitting back on their heels for it to succeed. Of course this meant that everyone in class was looking for the situp sweep to happen so they were all defending it. I don't think I got anywhere close to hitting it on anyone.
We drilled starting in closed guard and I was able to break the guard of everyone except Brian, guy just as insane legs and core strength. Even if he just hangs out and does nothing it's a bitch to get his guard open. I find myself baiting him and then passing when he goes for a sub. Eventually he's going to get good enough to catch me, especially if I keep doing it. I was able to sweep, submit, or pass on the under 180lb guys, but the bigger guys were generally shutting me down. No worries there since that's a black belt, a blue belt, a blue belt with 4 years of wrestling, and hyper athletic Brian. I'm still able to sweep Brian if I get tricky enough, and I can occasionally catch Ian in a sub if I get tricky with him, but Johnny is just too strong with too much pressure and too solid of a base for me to pull off anything other than a stalling game with him.

I'm honestly completely baffled as to why he doesn't dominate his division in competitions right now.

Overall I felt a little directionless rolling tonight. It was fun, and I was making stuff work, but I mostly was just falling back to my normal overhook game with a few new things bolted on. Which I guess is just fine in retrospect. I just want to sharpen that game up anyways, and having a solid butterfly game for when I just can't get closed guard makes it that much more dangerous.

I filmed most of the class today and will probably post some clips up after I've had a chance to watch it and chop it up. The files are enormous.

JiuJitsu 9/10

I got to class a little earlier and put in about 20 reps of the situp sweep, just trying to get a feel for it. Something about the extra bulk of wearing the gi makes it feel really awkward. I need more reps.

Techniques today were butterfly guard -> Armdrag -> Take the back. Several different ways to set it up. All pretty much the same. It was good to get in reps with the armdrag.

Did some positional rolling starting from butterfly guard and spent my time sweeping folks and passing guard. Taught Katie how to pin the knees on one side or another and pass with the shoulder to the gut. She needs all the tricks she can get since she weighs like 100lbs.

After that I rolled with Brian and a visiting blue belt named Phil from Daniel Moraes academy in Jacksonville. He had a very solid style on top, very good at taking away any space that opened up. The first roll we were fairly even with me working several sweep attempts which he blocked and me eventually turtling and moving to halfguard where we stayed for a while. Second roll with him I used my fav tech for breaking people down and was able to launch a nice series of attacks which failed, and eventually ended us up in halfguard again until he had a sudden cramp and had to bail.
Rolling with Brian was normal. I'll sweep him if he gets too aggressive, then if I give him the slightest chance he'll explode and resweep me. He tapped me with a nice north south choke the first time. Then I tapped to Kesa because I got bored under it and couldn't get anywhere. Then we sat around for a while and talked techniques. My guard was compared favorably with Moraes' guard, not that mine is anywhere near as good, but that it is a similar style. A very fun class and nice that I was competitive against a 5 year blue belt from another school that outweighed me by 30lbs who came to play. Always feels nice to validate your training a little like that.

Also, Mad props to my Jennosaurus who made sure I went to class tonight. I've skipped a few recently to help her with nursing school stuff and because I've been SUPER busy at work, but she made sure I got on the mats tonight and that's just one of the many reasons that she's awesome and I'm marrying her in ~30 days.

UGA Grappling Club 11/8

Tonight we started "Boring" Jiujitsu. The first few weeks I taught I would show 2-3 techniques, everyone would practice each technique ~10 times, then we would roll either starting from a specific position or just free rolling. This way everyone got introduced to the kinds of techniques they will eventually be able to use as well as getting to see how hard it is to apply those techniques against other people. This period also lets them get some of the SPAZZ out on each other and usually manages to convince them that if they want techniques to work that they will have to practice them.

Once I've got them hooked on the BJJ though, it's time to get serious. So tonight we went over the very first side control escape I showed them 6 weeks ago and I broke it down step by step, then we repped it 100 times each. We started with minimal resistance, just enough not to be a dead fish. Then every 10 reps we increased the resistance until the last 10 reps you were doing everything to prevent your opponent from escaping, including transitioning to other positions. Some folks were skeptical initially, but by the end of it everyone was very happy with how much they learned. I don't think most of them realized there could be that many details to something as simple as a side control escape. Honestly I could do like 30 hours worth of class time on nothing but side control escapes and still have only gotten started on what I know about them, much less what a black belt knows. I would love to have a month of side control escapes at Megalodon...

No rolling at all tonight. All drilling that escape. Boring JiuJitsu makes you good.

Jiujitsu 11/5: Good to be back!

So despite all the screw ups with the software upgrade I was working on tonight I made it to an hour of jiujitsu. I was rolling pretty hard today, a lot harder than I usually do, but I also noticed some things about my style which I need to fix pronto. I will list those first:
1. I have gotten into the habit of giving people grips on my gi pants as a way to lure them in since everyone runs away from my guard all of the time. This leads me too often to having to defend the pass before I can start attacking. BAD JIUJITSU! So I need to go back to starting in a good butterfly position and sticking to it. If my opponent wants to run away from me then I'll just have to chase them and get REALLY aggressive about it.

2. In no-gi I have gotten SLOPPY. I'm not breaking my opponents down and really fighting for my overhook control the way I should. I'm not going for the situp sweep as a combo to help me break people down. Definitely need to start putting in a little more no-gi time soon to keep me sharp.

3. My halfguard needs a tuneup. I used to be super dangerous from the bottom of half, now I seem to just stall out looking for the oldschool sweep and end up with people hanging on my neck. Gotta get aggro from the bottom of half again.

Now, on to what was awesome:
I hit a ton of armbars. Way more than I usually hit. I was willing to just throw my hips and legs up and see what happened a lot more tonight. As a result I hit something like 6 armbars, including a couple of triangle to armbar transitions.
My situp sweep attempts kept turning into Kimura sweeps though. I need to tune that up a little, gotta get someone to drill with me one day.

I hit a choke I've been looking at for a while but never really found the right place to try. It's a Cobra choke, which works thusly:

I have my grip on the opposite collar and I'm looking to set up my collar choke, my opponent manages to back away and goes for the double underhook pass. I defend the pass by spreading my knees open and digging my feet in under his thighs. I then put my free arm across the back of his neck and snack my hand under my arm that has the collar grip. Then I point the fingers of my non gripping hand at the ceiling and just.... make it tight. I hit that 2-3 times and it was awesome since I've been blocking that guard pass and not having any options. Now I have a great option.

I also hit a kimuraplata. This is a SLICK move for you little folks who find that people get a death grip on their clothes when you go for a kimura from guard, and those same people roll forward when you go for an omoplata.

Step 1: Get your kimura grip from guard and spin 90 degrees to put the kimura pressure on. Your opponent doesn't grab onto something, finish them. If they grab something then go to step 2.

Step 2: Keep your Kimura grip and continue rotating until you are in the omoplata position with the kimura grip. Begin to sit up like you are going to finish the omoplata, but keep the kimura grip. What this does is hook your leg around your opponents elbow and bend their elbow towards the front of their body while you have their wrist locked in place. So instead of moving the wrist to create the pressure on the shoulder you are moving the elbow to create pressure on the shoulder. It works a treat and is super sneaky.

I think this was one of my most productive classes in a while. I actually was able to pinpoint some specific weaknesses to work on, which is nice.

UGA Grappling Club 11/2

I did the last lesson in my "Beginners BJJ Curriculum" today. Normally I would have spent an entire month on each of the things I taught instead of a single class, but the idea is to keep the class fast paced and give people a taste of everything BJJ has to offer to keep them interested first. NOW I'll go back to the beginning and make them drill it over and over and over again.


We had a couple of new people, a couple of gigantic guys, one reasonable sized guy and a girl. Gave them a quick introduction to shrimping, up, and sitouts.

Techniques were attacks from guard. I leave submissions from guard until the end because I want to keep the emphasis on position and obtaining superior position instead of having everyone throwing up wild triangles at each other from the bottom. First I showed the two safe positions in guard, head in the solar plexus, hands in the armpits, weight down on your opponent. Then how to posture up using your opponents ribs and hips to post on. After that I showed triangle chokes concentrating on getting the hips high and getting a good kick over with the leg to make the choke successful. The refresher was really good for me as well since I've been letting my triangle chokes get super lazy and it's been hurting me.
Next up was armbar from the guard. I showed how to isolate the arm and bring it across the chest, then use your legs to trap and hold your opponent and finish. Briefly went over how to sweep from the armbar to finish if your opponent tries to stack you.

Rolling was King of the Mountain style with 5 groups on the mat and the other 6 or so people on the wall. I had them start in guard with the top guy trying to pass, the bottom guy trying to sweep or submit. Things rotated through pretty quickly and everyone got plenty of chances with different partners. I stepped in after everyone had been through once and got some time rolling with different folks. Hit a few situp sweeps, but found myself hesitating to fire the armbar on top a lot. I did hit a couple, but I definitely need to keep refining it. This is an excellent project for me for sure.

After that I let everyone roll open-mat style for a while and I grabbed people to roll with. One guy jumped on my neck from halfguard and tried to tear my head off, which annoyed me enough to pass, bust out the no-gi ezekiel, and then armbar him.

We've got a good solid core group in the club it seems like, so next week we can start in with the "boring" part of jiujitsu that really makes you good at it. Drilling.

Running, it sucks.

So I resolved to start running again to help improve my overall cardio as opposed to only my grappling specific cardio and boy do I need it. My course is 1.5 miles long, .75 up and .75 back. After the first .75 I was sucking wind and coughing like a pack-a-day smoker. I dunno why my lungs are being such bitches about it, but they HATE to run in the cold apparently. Well screw them! I'll be up for another 5am run tomorrow and try to push a little further since this time I ran .75 and walked .75. Once I can run the entire 1.5 I'm going to start edging it up until I'm doing 3 miles. My eventual goal is to run the 3 miles in under 20 minutes. If I actually keep at it with the running this time around I might be get there sometime in 2012....

I skipped JiuJitsu last week to let some minor injuries heal up before they became actual problems, back at it tonight teaching the grappling club. I'm going to teach triangles and armbars from the guard and go over the importance of posture and hand positioning.

Inspiration Struck

So I've been hit by inspiration in the form of this kid Rebecca "Mini-Beast" Forsyth. I've seen her at NAGA a few times when I was there and she's a super fierce little kid. She crushes the competition. Well a co-worker is thinking about putting his daughter in a martial art and I of course suggested BJJ. In order to show him an example of a girl about his daughters age competing I looked up some of Becca's vids from NAGA.
While watching them I noticed two things, firstly that the girl has only gotten more dominant in the last 8 months or so since I saw her compete last, and secondly that she has honed her situp sweep and armbar into a victory machine. She hits the situp sweep almost every match and frequently finishes with the armbar. That kind of dedication to just a handful of offensive techniques has given her a really sharp game. I also liked her technical standup about two minutes in to this video which is one of the cleanest I've ever seen. She follows it up with a nice takedown as well.

So in honor of the Mini-Beast I will be spending the next FOUR, that's right FOUR months working situp sweep and then armbar from the top. Nothing but those two techniques.

UGA Grappling Club 10/25

We were sharing the room with what appeared to be an Indian girls dance troupe of some sort this time around, which was interesting mostly because they kept screaming at each other about whose fault it was when their routine got messed up.

We started off drilling situp sweeps and mount escapes, then I went over the Kimura -> Guillotine -> Situp Sweep combo and we worked on the various parts of that for a while. Then because I had it as a request we did the Darce choke from top of halfguard. This is probably my single WORST submission, but I went over it anyways and we drilled it a little. I went over a halfguard sweep by request as well. My go-to sweep where you overhook, trap the same side leg, and upa. Everyone kept getting 2/3rds of the way through the upa, and then instead of pushing their opponent away EXTRA hard to gain separation and get to side control they would switch to hugging their opponent and land in top of halfguard. I corrected that and then we did positional sparring from the top of halfguard.

We had a couple of people come in towards the end of the positional sparring that have previous Tang Soo Do and Takewondo experience. I rotated them in as we started rolling to see what kind of folks they are. They weren't overly spazzy and both of them are fairly light, so not dangerous. One kept trying to canopener me or something, the other one attempted to get rubber guard from the bottom of side control. I answered that attempt by mounting him, letting him sweep me over, then immediately running through Mission Control -> New York -> Chill Dog -> Kung Fu Move -> Omoplata on him.

It seemed like a good class. It was one of our smaller ones with only 10 people in it, but I expect attendance to pick up again once the dance troupes are all done practicing.

I'm still floundering around a little trying to figure out how I want to proceed with my own training. I think I should revisit some of my old No-Gi basics for Gi since the Situp sweep and Triangle choke used to be my bread and butter, but I don't really hit either in Gi that much. Unless I get some brilliant stroke of inspiration by wednesday I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks just working on situp sweep and triangle. There is a triangle choke setup off of the failed situp sweep, so I want to work that as well.

And as long as I'm talking about triangles, I figured out WTF I'm doing that's lowering my triangle choke percentages in Gi. I figured it out because I did it in No-Gi last night. I'm leaving my hips far too close to my opponent and being far too lazy about the sub. In fact, I've been far too lazy about everything while working on my flow. I've just been flowing with people and looking for openings and then if I get too much resistance just transitioning off to something else. If I'm going to go through all of the trouble to setup a triangle and get halfway to it, I need to go ahead and work harder to finish it.

Bit of a slump

So after talking several other folks through how to deal with their slumps over the last 8 months or so I've hit one myself. The guys in my class that I'm better than I'm just plain better than. The guys that I'm not better than are gigantic purple belts or gigantic wrestlers and the gap between us is pretty big because of that. So I'm having a hard time bridging the gap between where I am and where I want to be.

Luckily I know the answer. Drill. Drill my A-game. Drill my B-game. Drill my backup plans. Drill my go-to-hell plans. Drill drill drill and drill some more. So tonight I'm going to abuse my position as instructor for the UGA Grappling club and get some No-Gi reps in of my A-Game no-gi sweeps and a few other things. See if I can break myself out of the rut.

JiuJitsu 10/14

So true to my resolution I continued working on my A game and my general flow last night and I can definitely feel the improvement over where I was six months ago.

Techniques were an ezekiel from the back where you rotate so that you are looking in your opponents ear, drive your bottom wrist around to on top of their far shoulder, grab your sleeve, and ezekiel.
Then a quick armbar from the back, then an armbar from the back with a kimura grip for greater control.
And finally an armbar vs the turtle where you scoop their far arm with your far arm then roll onto your side. You can finish there or have the option to flip them over and finish.

We did specific sparring from the turtle, Rugby is getting better already, he was able to shake me off a couple of times and get back to guard. Once was my own fault since I felt the triangle setup that I use and automatically went for it, resulting in him escaping to a neutral position.
My single collar choke setups are getting sneakier and sneakier as well.

Rolling was with Ankhor and Katie. Ankhor is one of the super athletic guys that does Muay Thai and BJJ, he's got an MMA fight coming up at the end of those month. A few months ago he was giving me absolute fits because of how strong he is, but over the last 3-4 months I've gotten a lot stronger and improved my technique. So last night I was able to breakdance all over him for the first time in a long time.

Katie is like 14 and is Casey's daughter. I'm not sure how seriously she takes JiuJitsu, but she's there pretty regularly and I try to give her tips on how to make stuff work when you are 100lbs lighter than everyone. Sometimes she seems to be working hard at it, sometimes she doesn't seem to care. But I think if she had some more people her size that she could see the stuff working on it would motivate her more. Instead the next lightest person is like 40lbs heavier than she is and probably 5x as strong. Definitely not a recipe for morale building.

Workin' my A game

Ok, so normally I would entering a new month of experimentation, digging through youtube, reading Subs101 or lockflow, generally just casting about for new techniques to play with. Instead I've decided to go for another month of consolidation on my current game and try to bring it up a level against our purple belts and a couple of the big athletic blue belts. I know there are tricks I can use on them that will work, now I'm going to make a concerted effort to work this tricks and refine them. Time to take things to the next level with my current game until I find a place where I don't have the proper tool. At the moment I think I have plenty of tools to work with.

Weightlifting 10/7

I'm thinking of switching to only updating my lifting stats once a month or something.... 4 times a week makes for a bunch of short little posts with no content.

That being said, hit 5 reps at 127.5, 3 at 147.5, and 5 reps at 163.5 on the bench. That's a personal record of volume for me. Whoot!

Hip Control

I had mentioned to BJJGrrl that controlling the hips was one of those things that was crucially important to a lot of aspects of JiuJitsu, and everyone told me that for years, but I never really understood what it MEANT or how to accomplish it until recently.

I've worked out that there are three ways to kill someones hip movement, the direct method, the indirect method, and retreating. With the direct method you are using solid pressure directly onto their hips. An example would be when you are in someones closed guard and you put your hands on their hip bones and drop your weight on them. You've directly shutdown their hips in order to work on opening their guard and passing. This method requires that you be able to solidly manage your weight, keep it centered, and "drive" down into your opponent. This is probably the first method that most people discover for controlling the hips.

The Indirect method is the method that I've actually found to be most useful though. With the indirect method I'm not attacking the hips directly, I'm removing the levers that control that hip motion, the legs. Every motion of the hips requires that the legs be involved to generate the torque and force required to accomplish anything. Shrimping, bridging, all of it involves driving with the legs. Because of this my primarily method of hip control has become the legs. An example is from mount when you grapevine the legs, it does add some direct pressure to kill the hips, but it mostly just takes the legs out of the equation. I expand on that concept whenever I'm on top and work to lift my opponents legs off of the ground to prevent shrimping. For example, in side control I will turn slightly towards my opponents feet and grab their FAR leg at the knee and pull it up off of the ground. This makes it very difficult for them to shrimp and makes it easier for me to transition to mount if I want to. I follow the same idea when I'm passing guard. I hug the knees, sprawl and then turn and lift to keep my opponents feet off of the ground. This stops them from shrimping away or chasing me with their legs.

The third method is retreating or transitioning. This is the method I use the most now and it's even LESS direct than the direct method. I feel like this method is best suited for a smaller person who is working against a larger person and is still applicable even against people of the same size or smaller, it's just not as necessary. With this method you just remove yourself from where their hips want you to be. If you are in side control and they start to shrimp to regain guard you transition towards north south then pop to Knee on Belly as they follow you. If they try to bridge you off there you spin and sit down on their head for headmount/northsouth. If they start to escape that you slide down to side control on the opposite side and start the process over again. You have to be pretty sensitive to when your opponent is moving to make this work though.

Now, the BEST method, and one I'm just starting to reliably be able to use, is a combination of all three. When I'm moving to KoB I like to grab the far leg at the knee and pull up to prevent shrimping away from me. At the same time I use the KoB to drive heavily into the hips to pin the hips. When I'm sweeping someone I maintain control of their hips either with leg pressure across the hips directly, or with a hook under the knee, or with a handful of pants. Concordantly I work to keep my hips AWAY From my opponent. This flipside of this entire thing is that controlling your OWN hips is just as important as controlling your opponents. If they have your hips locked down you can't do much to them. So again the legs come into play. If your hips are pinned by direct pressure you have to be explosive even if it's a tiny explosion. Just enough to unfreeze your hips on one side and pop out. If your legs are being lifting try to pull your knees up to your chest and pop them open like butterfly guard. If someone is using fast transitions then trick them. Fake shrimping one way the roll to your knees on the other side.

Above all look at ways to prevent your opponent from using their hips while finding ways to maximize your own hip movement.

JiuJitsu 10/7

Worked on a takedown for a bit, then flower sweep variation and a triangle combo with it. Fun times.
Did some specific sparring from guard where I played around trying to figure out what I want to work on this month, then rolled for a while.

I had a couple of big guys to play with and spent my time letting them start in side control or mount so that I could work out of it. One of them managed to spark my rage for a moment when he tried to use gorilla strength on my head to keep me from taking his back. Whenever someone big does that it momentarily releases my normal mental block, so I immediately smashed him to the ground, drive my forearm into his neck/jaw, then armbarred him when he tried to defend against that. Everything was super hard and fast until the armbar went on. I never completely lose control, but that contained rage is something I've been trying to harness so that I can let it out at tournaments when it would really be helpful to be moving twice as fast as I normally do. He also tried to americana me from inside my guard, instant armbar again. He's a good guy, and I look forward to how good he's gonna be when he gets some more training time in, but he's only been training for a week or two, so he still has some bad habits to grind out of him.

This is an "Experiment" month for me, but I have no idea what I want to try out... Gonna have to browse lockflow/sub101/etc... and find some stuff to play with. Or I might hit the Roy Dean purple belt DVD and make it an Experimental Combo month and see what I can put together.

Weightlifting 10/2 and 10/3

Benchpress was only 6 reps at 155 I believe, don't have my notes with me right now.
Overhead press was 9 reps with 90lbs which is very solid for me.
Tomorrow will be squats again which puts me starting my third week of 5/3/1. Overall I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing. I'm looking forward to maxing out again at the beginning of December to see where I'm at.