Daily Submission

A little late on this one but better late then never. Rolled no-gi last thursday. Prior to class I spent about 20 minutes working on my shot. I don't get to drill it enough. The speed is coming back now I need to start training it with a partner. Technique wise we worked off the arm drag in butterfly guard. The first technique was the armdrag to the back. It can be seen here:



Incidently, the guy being demoed on is Stephan Kesting who, like my coach Adam, is a Marcus Soares Black Belt. His stuff is great, check out grapplearts.tv for more.

Then we worked a simple counter. When he arm drags, we post that arm and hope over to the other side, landing in side control.

Next was a re-drag counter, which ended up with the guy on top taking his partners back. Tough to explain. Basically, as he tries to take your back, you re-drag his arm and slip behind him. I can't explain it more because I still suck at it.

So on to rolling. Rolled with this dude Dan, who I don't really know. I think he started at the gym during my absence and he comes on different days then me. So basically, I had no idea what to expect. He was pretty good. I had my wrestling shoes on since I was practicing my shot earlier and I somewhat made a transition back to wrestler. Not a bad thing really as I almost never rely on my wrestling. He was good. His half guard was sick. I have posted on my half guard phase and how I focused on it exclusively for like a month. I have a pretty decent handle on it. He was on another level. Sweep me twice with it, even though I saw it coming. Hit a nice flower sweep on me, which is difficult because I have a pretty good base. Tapped me a few times, once with a darce.

I felt I did OK. I got his back once, passed his guard once. I really had to focus on my defensive game. Spent a lot of time on the bottom in a front head and arm. I hit my spin out (armspin) once but he stuff all the rest of my tricks. My peek outs were good but not good enough. I managed to shut down his darce attempts for a long time before he finally hit it.

But the bottom line was I got my butt kicked. I felt a little better after talking to Adam. I had asked if Gavin one of our senior Blues was up for his purple any time soon. He said after Dan. As far as he was concerned he was a purple already, he was just waiting on Marcus. So I got beat by a (almost) purple belt. No shame in that.

Daily submission

Yesterday, we went back to the basics a bit. We worked on re guarding from side control, the mount and turtled. With the exception of the re guard from the mount, they all involved some sort of roll. I am not so good with the rolls. I can roll forward back or even on an angle but alot of these involved a roll with a spin, while spreading the legs to catch the guy in your guard. I still need a lot of work on this type of thing. If I roll or otherwise scramble, I tend to square up to the guy and go for the single or double. I turtle a lot as well. That is the wrestling and judo background, I feel comfortable there. Unfortunately, against really good jiu jitsu players, it is a bad place to spend much time. However, I do have a couple of go to moves from here. I use an armspin, peterson roll, granby rolls and a few others. I will try to find some video to post or maybe make it up myself if I have to.