January 31st - Gi

Greg taught a good class about choking from the back mount.  It's nice to go over the same topic with 2 different instructors within the same week.  Our warm-up consisted of jogging and movement drills around the mat we did some shrimping and rolling.  It appeared that everyone got really dizzy.

Greg demonstrated on me for the first technique.  While it's very cool to be used to show techniques it is also makes me a bit nervous.  Often times the instructor wants you to react a certain way to show how someone could foil the technique being taught.  There's always a chance that you do the wrong thing in front of everyone.  It has gotten easier over time with experience. 

I had some trouble finishing the first choke with Fuji.  The problem ended up being that I needed to secure a higher grip with both of my hands.  I also had a little trouble with the gi grip but Greg showed us a little trick to use when there is a difficult collar to grip by folding it over as a handle.  We did the same cross grip for the next choke be we did it from a shoulder mount position with a gift wrap.  It was one of the Judo chokes that I've always had problems with, because you raise their arm over their head into kind of a half nelson.  Doing it from the shoulder mount made this quite a bit easier.  This made Fuji tap quite a bit quicker.

We partnered up and did some back mount training with 2 minute rounds and then switched the position or switched partners.  I partnered with the new girl at one point and she was actually pretty impressive for her first class.  I did well and only had problems with Fuji.  We did King of the mat guard passing to finish the class off.  I need to learn how to deal with lasso spider guard because both Fuji and Greg were kicking my butt with it.  Ray had me in a tight deep half and tweaked my knee a bit but it's okay, I probably should have tapped though.  Greg performed a guard clinic on me a couple times by switching from spider to lasso to some combination of spider butterfly to x-guard and then the standup sweep.