Wednesday, March 5, 2014

March 4th 2014 - Gi Morning & Evening

Morning
Theme & Techniques: Neck/Hip Throw, Standing Guard Break & Toreando Pass

Jordan returned today from a month off due to his ear injury.  He said a few times that he felt "out of grappling shape"  I feel for him and know that when we have our third child next month, I'll spend some time away from the mats. We also had a visitor, Zack, for his first class today.  I helped him out with a lot of the warm-up stuff.

I ended up working with Ben who I thought was named John for some reason.  He's pretty intense and good to work with.  Not spazzy but holds his breath and uses more strength and energy than he needs to.  We did several reps with the guard break and then the pass.  I was having a little trouble with pain in my fingers during the sleeve transition and went to a pistol grip instead a couple of times, but it wasn't good enough.  I'll have to tape a little bit more tonight.

Rolling: Guard Position (6 x 2 min rnds), Free Rolling

I partnered with Ben, Zack, and Tim for the positional sparring.  I didn't give up and passes from the bottom and had a few sweeps.  I did my best to only work on the standing break that we worked on in class from the top position.  Zack made a comment about how hard it was.  Tim seemed to be getting a little frustrated, until I made the comparison of me doing this for 3 years and him for 3 weeks, plus I out weigh him by quite a bit.  I'm seeing improvement in him big time, but it's very difficult to measure your progress when you're first starting out.

I rolled with Tim after class and focused on playing with the 2 on 1 grip.  I used it to arm drag and butterfly sweep.  From there it was top game as per usual.  Greg discussed the bad habit of resting an ankle on your knee while defending in side control due to ankle locks with both Tim and Jordan.  Jordan and I rolled after that and I tried to work the 2 on 1 again but he did a good job of stopping it.  I also did some lasso and attempted a shoalin sweep from half guard.  Greg gave me some pointers on it later.  I surprised Jordan close to the end by switching sides and going for the cross guard on my weak side and hitting the omoplata.  I've been going for the submission more first rather than going directly for the sweep like I used to.  It's usually obvious when the sub isn't going to work and the sweep usually presents itself.  Where before I had no chance of finishing the sub.

Evening
Theme & Techniques: Standing Guard Break & Toreando Pass

During the warm-up Greg had us take turns trying to stand on the stability ball.  The best I was able to do was get one foot into standing position.  That is harder than it looks.

Worked with Ross for this portion of class.  My fingers are pretty sure from all of the sleeve pulling.  We got a ton of reps in and I can see now from working with both Ben and Ross today that the most difficult part of this technique is posturing up at the top.   

Rolling: Guard King of the Mat

It was the first time I can recall the guard passer was the one that stayed in king of the mat.  I had quite a few great matches.  One with Chris that really stood out was getting stuck for a long time with him in over/under pass, and he eventually ended up sweeping me.  Greg told me later that my butt was up a little high and I needed to straighten my arm out more and punch it.  Another time I had a nice collar grip and almost pulled off a loop choke but he was able to get his head out.  Mike gave me some pointers on the choke afterwards.  I was missing falling to the open side of the choke.  I also had a few good rolls with Israel, our visiting purple belt.  He does have a different style than we are all used to which will make us all the better as we learn to deal with it.

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