Sunday BJJ 2/10/08
Sunday's class was good. I didn't go to the competition class. Instead, I took it easy and made it in for the regular BJJ class at 3:30.
Often after a competition Coach will go over something that he noticed a lot of people having problems with at the tournament. Usually, it's a fundamental. After the tournament last July, we reviewed clearing your leg from someone's half-guard. Today, we went over how to reestablish guard from under side mount. So, I'll do my best to outline this technique.
We broke it up into two drills, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to start from the worst case scenario, where I'm flat on my back. My opponent has me in side mount with both ar
ms isolated. It looks exactly like this picture borrowed from 3peaksfitness.com (which hopefully they won't get mad about my using... but if you do, I'm happy to remove it). This sucks. Both of his knees are up tight to her body. He's got a strong gable grip, isolating her left arm on the topside of his head. This exposes that arm to keylocks or armbars. Her right arm is trapped high between his body and his leg. If he keeps his hips low and drives his shoulder into her jaw, she is definitely a very unhappy camper.
What she wants to do from this position is reestablish guard. To do that, she will need to get space, and to do THAT, she needs to get up on her right side, get her left arm UNDER his head so she can keep that arm safe and use her left elbow to help create space. Her right arm need to block his hip, and to do that, she needs to bring that elbow in and down, with her right hand cupping his hip. This is Stage 1, which returns her to a solid defensive posture from which she can regain guard, which is Stage 2.
So, the following is the outline of the techniques starting from the above picture:
Stage 1:
- Bridge INTO my opponent while simultaneously
- Bringing my right elbow inside with my hand cupping my opponent's hip.
- At the same time, reaching with my left hand back driving my opponent's head back.
- I should now be able to bring that arm back in and under his head. If he's really stubborn, I'll need to persuade him a little by grinding my elbow under his jawline.
- I may still be flat on my back, but now I've got my elbows in tight and I'm ready for stage 2.
- Once again, I need to bridge INTO my opponent
- while widening out my left elbow (this makes it very uncomfortable for my opponent to drive in, as the more he drives in, the more pressure on his own throat he's creating)
- and this time, I'm going to hip escape/shrimp out,
**DETAIL: I need to hip escape BEFORE my hips hit the mat. It's common for new guys to bridge up, then drop the hips back down to the mats and THEN try to hip escape. Doesn't do me any good to do that. - locking out my arms (not all the way straight, but strong)
- bringing my right knee to my right elbow
- then driving back to create space enough to bring the leg through for guard.
