July 22nd 2014 - Gi

Theme & Techniques: Shoulder Throw, Back Mount Cross Choke, Guillotine from Guard

Worked with Harvey on the technique portion.  He seems to learn best by talking the details of each technique out.  It did get a little slow at times but hopefully he learned something.  I appreciate how he get's excited when he figures something out or learns something new.  He had the common problems that everyone has: didn't have his hip over far enough for shoulder throw; had some trouble with wrist position during the cross choke; moving the hips back to make some space to get a good arm position on the guillotine.

Rolling: Back Mount Position (2 min), Guard Position (2 min), Free Rolling (5 min rnds)

People have described Harvey as having old man strength and after today I would agree.  When I had him in back mount, I kept him under control, but he got a hold of my choking hand and I could not get it back for the life of me.  I was able to escape his back mount once, but the second time he did a great job with his hooks to keep me from getting free. 

I went with Mike (lawyer) for this portion of class.  I was hoping to rekindle my focus on cross guard, but he did a great job of keeping his hips way back right from the get go.  I was just barely able to keep him from passing, I resorted to using leg over head recovery and the kimura to attempt a back take but settled for regaining guard. From top he did almost get me in a triangle but my posture saved me.  I was am way too lazy dealing with sleeve grips in guard lately. 

Robert and I had a great roll.  There was lots of back and forth.  As soon as I would pass his guard he would be able to get a knee back in.  I've got to figure out how he's doing this and figure out how to make my side mount better.  I did have an arm trapped at one point and we had a bit of a scramble where I ended up on top. 

I worked with Harvey on some grip breaks after class and gave him a short version of July 2nd's class.  Then I worked with Bhuvana on the half guard sweep that she's been working on.  I like the approach that she's taking as this is the position that she is ending up in very often, so she's researching and drilling a technique to deal with it.  I attempted a technique from Tinguinha's cross guard DVD but didn't quite get it to work.  I lent the DVD to Greg today so I watched it a few times recently.  Bhuvana and I rolled for a little while.  I decided not to go for submissions and tried to flow from position to position as smoothly as I could.  There came a point when she was panicking a little bit and I talked her through calming down and then using her bridge to make the position a little less uncomfortable for her.