Wednesday, May 15, 2013

May 14th 2013 - Gi (Ninja class)

Everyone except Greg and Jordan were wearing black gis last night; it probably looked like ninja class to anyone walking by.  Greg added a new exercise to our warm-up, it was like a half Homer Simpson walk on one shoulder and then rolling to the other shoulder all the way down the floor.  It was pretty good for keeping pressure while in side mount or passing. 

The theme of the class was passing the closed guard with the double under pass.  We started out with breaking the guard open using the double lapel grab along with the pants grab then turning sideways.  If that didn't work we would grab the pants with both hands and step back again.  From either of these spots we would pull the elbows in to get double under grips on the belt and then pulling them onto our thighs.  From here to complete the pass we used our exercise from earlier to put pressure on their legs while walking around into side control position.  One key thing that I took away from this is how important it is to keep your elbows tight to their legs otherwise they will be able to counter the pass by grabbing your sleeves.

We trained from the closed guard with king of the mat.  Greg and Adam were crowned kings as they spent a majority of the time out there.  I felt like I was pretty close a couple times with Adam, but eventually he was able to get to his knees and I don't have an answer to his wrestling from that position.  My goto was the armpit grip to standup and try to shake them off or pass from there.  Greg and Jerad swept me a couple of times.  Greg really frustrates me with his spider guard and more people are starting to use it as well.  I rolled with Gina at the end of class and she noticed that I was doing my best not to crush her.  Greg showed her a cool way to remove my grip on her pants with kind of an RNC motion and grabbing the gi.  I will be adding this to my repertoire.  After that she was able to effectively use spider guard on me as well.

I am diverting my attention to the study of passing the guard and finding answers to the spider guard.  I watched a few videos last night and I'm going to continue to immerse myself with videos and drilling until I understand it a little better and become a true guard passing ninja.

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