Wednesday BJJ Class 10/17/2007

I went to Wednesday’s class. Close to missing out. I was driving from downtown Seattle to Kent, where the school is. This is usually about a 35 or 40 minute drive, but on Wednesday traffic crawled ALL THE FRIGGIN’ WAY. It was grueling. Fortunately, I had a podcast to keep me occupied, so I was relatively content to listen to the latest information on the UFC and Randy Couture’s unexpected “resignation” (not to be confused with a “retirement” which could freeze his contract and keep him from fighting again).

So, I rolled into class and made it out onto the mat with moments to spare before warmups started.

Technique involved a method of getting around spider guard. I’ve written in the past about Todd’s spider guard and how I couldn’t even break the grip, much less pass. Against someone who’s got long legs, being caught in spider can make you feel like you’re a marionette on the wrong end of string. Dance, monkey boy, dance!

The first thing to do is break one of the grips. Coach Foster showed us first to identify which grip is the most troublesome. It’s easier to break the grip that is creating the most pressure. So, if my opponent has grips on both sleeves, and one foot planted on my bicep with the other posting on my hip, I’ll want to break the grip on the bicep side. If my opponent has his leg hooked around my arm, that’s the side I’ll go to. If both feet are posting in my bicep, there will generally be one high and one low. I’ll go to the high side, because that’s the side with the most pressure. Pretty straight forward.

To break the grip, I’m simply going to bring my knee inside that leg and while I jerk my arm back I’m going to drive my hips in and force the leg back a little. I want to be careful to not allow my opponent to get ahold of my other foot and of course, I don’t want to spaz out and lose my balance or compromise my stability. Now that I have that arm free, I’m going to get a good grip on his pants at the knee.

Okay, here’s the fun part and it’s actually a bit counterintuitive. I want to really be able to drive his knee to the ground, and if I move immediately to his back, I can’t get a lot of leverage, so anyone good will be able to hip out, turn into me and at least make the pass difficult if not immediately re-establish guard. So, instead, I’m going to move in a big circle all the way around. So, if you picture this from above like a clock, I’m at about 6 pm, with my opponent’s head at 12 o’clock. I’m going to grip his pants at the knee with my right hand and drive his left knee to the ground on top of his right leg. This is going to get him up on his right side and make it very difficult for him to hip escape or turn into me. Because I’m moving around in front of him, I can keep my weight firmly on that knee as I use my right arm to pivot all the way around from 6 pm through midnight and back to 3 o’clock into side control with my opponent still up on his right side facing away from me. One of the blue belts brought up that you could, if you wanted to, drive the knee to the ground, begin moving to the front, and then redirect around to side control. Pretty much accomplishes the same thing. The key is that you don’t just start back until that knee is firmly planted on the ground.

We drilled that until sparring. It was a very large class, so we did 2 minute rounds on a rotation again. I started with Todd and had an opportunity to try that pass. Of course, it didn’t work. Pinning his legs proved to be a little more difficult than it was during the drills. Breaking his grip as instructed worked like a charm, though. I’m going to keep working on that pass.
I got to roll with Coach, too. That’s always interesting. I got one, “Nice,” as I passed guard into side control (I thrive on positive feedback!) At one point, Coach had some kind of head/arm choke and as he rolled to his side, I kind of slid over and into a control position on top. While I’d like to say I did something to “reverse” the position, the reality is that he probably let it go when I didn’t have the good sense to tap.

It was a fun class. Oh, and lest I forget, Doug got his blue belt and several people added stripes to their white belts. Congratulations are in order for everyone who received promotions!