Friday, June 7, 2013

June 6th - No Gi (Thanks to the Newbies)

Once again I had to sit through the end of the beginner gi class and watch while everyone had fun training.  Apparently it was the largest class so far, from memory there had to be at least 14 students.  They finished the class with up/down/out guard passing.  For only an hour class everyone seemed to get a pretty good workout.

We had our regular warm-up and I feel like I improved a bit with the hand walking.  I'm at least going in the right direction now.  The technique of the class was north/south choke which is one of the few techniques I consider my own.  I made a few improvements working my bicep into the choke a little more.  Adam seems to be my go to partner lately when we are both in class and we choked the crap out of each other over and over again.  The second part to the technique was if they tried to roll away and escape we would convert it to a modified tight guillotine choke.  This was awesome especially if you could take it all the way to guard.

We trained starting from side control and then rolling from there for 3 minutes, then we switched who was on top and went another 3 minutes.  I rolled with Greg, Mike, Roland, Adam, Bauer, and Robert.  Adding that up 36 minutes of good rolling went by fast.

I came to the realization last night that I'm thankful for all of the new guys that have been coming in.  My teammates that are better than me make me better by putting the pressure on me and submitting me over and over again.  The new guys allow me to work on new things.  I can practice something and screw it up and then reset and try again.  The catch is that I don't want to always smash them and use my "A" game.  To utilize their full potential I usually try to do what we worked on in class or something I'm not good at but want to be.  Lately I've been mimicking Greg's game a little by trying to setup guillotines from top half guard as well as do some fancy foot work.  I also pulled off a couple north/south chokes last night.

I picked up a new side control escape yesterday that I hadn't worked on previously but I've had it done to me a lot.  It's basically making a little bit of space and then fitting your knee in between and kicking your leg over for an armbar.  If you get the armbar, great!  If not you should be able to shrimp away into butterfly or open guard.  I know it's pretty basic but I think it's something that will work well my other escapes.


My ribs are still sore from Tuesday.  It's more of a muscle thing not a cartilage or bone problem so I'll get over it, but it made it uncomfortable to get to sleep last night.  I've been working on a new website idea with the help of Greg.  It will be a repetition tracker where students can log their reps of certain techniques.  I'll post more about it soon and ask for thoughts on what to include in the site.

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