Wednesday Class 5/7/2008

Another big class yesterday. The school is growing so fast!

We worked on strategies and techniques from guard that will help when a wrestler is stalling. You know, when someone's in your closed guard and they're tired or maybe don't want to worry about passing. They've got their head buried in your sternum, and are either pinning your hips to the mat or maybe are blocking your arms.

The gist of the drills, and the overriding principle that Coach seemed to emphasize was to think about what you have free, rather than on what's trapped. If he's pinning my hips, that means my arms are free to push on his head and create room to shrimp out and get something going. If he's pinning my arms, then my hips are free to shrimp out. Either way, the idea is that if I'm trapped under a guy who's stalling, for whatever reason, it becomes up to me to push the action. In a match, this might mean the difference between a lame 2-0 loss if you're taken down by a good wrestler and then just held there because he's worried about trying to pass guard.

We then did a guard passing drill where one guy gets into any sort of guard position they want, and you try to pass. Then we sparred. I did pretty well. Nothing spectacular, although I'm happy to have passed Josh's guard once (and got swept once, too).

I felt really good after class, and am looking forward to class tomorrow night. As an aside, I went and had a 1 hour massage at the Everest Massage School (formerly Ashmead). I am a huge fan of massage, and can't believe it's been months since my last one. I'm going to go back to trying to get one monthly, and am totally sold on continuing at the clinic. The price ($30/hour) is very reasonable, the massages are consistently good and I don't get any of the fru-fru stuff that, quite frankly, makes me uncomfortable.