February 7th - Gi (I'm back?)

Greg focused the whole class on one technique, which I really enjoyed.  It was a half guard pass from the top position when they have the dreaded underhook.  This is the position I love to have from the bottom so I was a little concerned when we started to learn a defense for one of my favorite positions.  The technique was to straighten legs and arms in kind of a bear crawl position then to kick over and sit in inverted half guard next to the opponent.  The hardest part for me was during the kick over and sit we were to grab the back of the gi and do a cross face with our shoulder.  The cross face in this technique is probably the single most important thing to keep control over the person.  From there we feed the gi into the hand that's behind their neck then work our leg out with shrimping and then putting our foot on their thigh.  I know that's probably confusing, the video at the bottom of the post was the closest I could find to describe what we worked on.

We kind of free rolled from the starting half guard position for this pass.  I noticed some people weren't trying to the pass which was odd.  Why not get some practice in on what we're working on?  Every time I failed was due to not being able to effectively keep the cross face.  However, there were a few times I was able to complete it.

We did king of the mat from closed guard and I was king of my area for a several rounds.  My left knee was still a little iffy and I eventually let one of the new guys pass me instead of trying to risk keeping guard and hurt myself.  When I "tried" to pass Greg's guard he blew me away with how he setup spider guard and then easily swept me into half.  Hopefully one day my spider guard will somewhat resemble his.

So, I'm back after taking a week off.  I thought I was finally done worrying about my knees with the lifting, biking, and swimming I've been doing.  My recovery time was a lot shorter this time and it didn't feel as injured as it did the last time I tweaked it.  I was able to get back on the bike on Monday and I've also started using the foam roller which feels good.  I'm going to try another round of this and if I end up injuring it again I may have visit the doctor again.