November 17th - Hapkido

I decided to make the ground fighting class theme to be breaking and passing the guard to be a counter balance the theme of sweeps from the guard from last week.  I followed the pattern that Conan or Jerad would use by teaching how to break the guard then start with the knee cut type passes.  One concept that was a little hard to teach was keep pressure into them with the hips while doing the baseball slide, it seemed like everyone wanted to put their weight down on the floor to their knees where I notice when I do it I would put pressure against their body as I slide across their thigh.  From there I showed the other types of passes starting with double under pass, one of my most effective passes. 

I talked about some other ways to break the guard like how to stand up in guard get an arm to crow bar their legs and then shake them off.  We ended with the vertical shin pass (or whatever it's called) that Greg taught a while back to break the guard or as a triangle defense.  As expected the students had a little trouble getting the shin and foot in the right place.  To finish up I had then partner up and work on which ever guard pass they wanted with a little resistance.  Below is a video from Jason Scully demonstrating a whole lot of guard passes.  I love his videos and find them very helpful.

 

During free rolling I didn't have problems with anyone until I went up against Mike from work.  Mike is a big dude so that is already one advantage in his favor.  I didn't play it too aggressively and ended up on bottom in half guard.  He picked some things up from the guard passing class and was able to use the double under pass kind of although I was able to go to turtle went to turtle.  I eventually inverted and got him in an inverted triangle which I thought I could do something with but it turned out Mike just kind of laid on my head as I tried to make the triangle tighter.  So we ended up being suck there for a little bit until I let it go.  I was able to regain guard but we quit soon after because he was gassed.  Unfortunately being smashed by him caused me some back strain that is still bothering me today.  Am I ever going to get back to 100% healthy?

During the Hapkido portion we worked on a succession of techniques from a distraction strike to a chicken wing lock.  Then if they straightened their arm we moved into a straight armlock.  If they were able to bend their elbow out of that we finished with a push over takedown.  To further explore that last technique we also did it as a defense from a clinch tie-up position.  Something that I've used a couple times in Jiu-Jitsu.