September 2nd & 3rd - No-Gi/Gi

I made a request to Conan on Saturday to work on back mount because it was the best position to avoid knee pain.  He gladly complied with my request.  We ended up working on escapes and defenses.  We worked mostly on the defenses that I've seen before.  However, I did notice that Conan used the scoop that I saw in the University book.  He didn't really bring it up until the end of class when he asked about what we learned.  I kind of liked that addition to the class, because I'd like to hear what everyone else has to say about class.

I rolled with both Adam and Conan who took it easy on me.  I'm learning how to pull side control bottom very well.  There was only one time when I felt a little scared for my knee was where I kind of ended up with a butterfly with my left leg which made me automatically tap.  I felt like the creative juices were flowing a bit because I had to find different ways to get around that didn't cause pain or put me in danger.  I also didn't care as much about winning and just wanted to experiment and find things that worked.  I have no delusions that either of them weren't being super easy on me though.

Greg taught Monday night and I did not have the opportunity to request something to work on that wouldn't hurt me.  But, it turned out better than expected because we worked on dealing with being stacked during an armbar attempt.  So I could keep my knee off the floor for the most part.  The first technique that we did was a flower/pendulum sweep to take mount.  Doing this from an armbar was new to me and I really enjoyed it because I love the flower sweep.  If they put the other leg up we switched the technique to invert and go to the belly and complete the armbar, if they then kept their arm locked up we'd pull on their pants and sweep to take the top position and complete the armbar from there.

I sat out of drilling because they started from the closed guard.  They went a couple of 3 minute rounds and I saw some good things happening.  We then did more of an open mat and I rolled with Ken for a minute and Mike for 5.  I had one good thing happen with Mike when I switched my collar grip to a baseball bat and kind of swept through him.  We were told to cool it soon after by Greg because he didn't want me to hurt myself.  Which I probably needed because it's tough to not be competitive with Mike.