August 5th 2015 - Gi All Levels

Theme & Techniques: Standing Headlock Defense Hammerlock to RNC, Elbow Escape from Mount, Armbar from Mount
Partner: Tom

Had a few visitors today to make for a good size class.  Tom was one of those visitors with a couple stripes on his white belt.  He told me later that he's been training on and off for quite a few years and even trained at LMAC before I got there.

Training the techniques went pretty smoothly.  Probably the only thing I'll add from yesterday is when you take down the opponent and lock in the RNC lean them back a little bit and don't allow them to sit straight up and get their hips under them.

Rolling: Mount Position (6 x 2 min), Free Rolling (2 x 4 min)
Rolled With: Tom, Morgan, Tyler, Ross, Mike A

Mount went pretty well for me.  I'm feeling more confident in maintaining the position but it often takes me a while to setup a submission.  From the bottom I was even able to use the elbow escape which I generally don't rely on.  I went for a few ezekiels, I'm still not sure about the angle to choke the best at because Morgan said it sucked really bad to be in it but it wasn't necessarily choking him.  I was impressed with Tyler's (high school senior) mount he seemed to have some skill from there in attacking. 

I got to break in Ross's new blue belt with a nice roll.  I've been having to fight a little harder at the start because he's getting better and more aggressive with his guard passing.  I was able to pull him down into deep half.  From there I felt a bit of confidence that I haven't experienced from this position.  Sometimes I get a little paralysis by analysis with all of the options that I've been working on but I took a quick inventory on what was available while doing that I was getting underneath and trying to unbalance him a bit and the basic sweep just happened.  He did catch me a little bit coming up and I wasn't able to go right into the leg drag but instead went for the over/under pass.  After rolling I showed him to push on my head to help prevent the pass.

Mike asked to start in over/under pass position to practice fighting it.  The first time he was able to prevent it pretty well and eventually get was in side control and taking my back.  He submitted me with a shoulder lock after I tried several escapes.  In our second roll I started a little tighter and had to switch sides on the over under and ended up in kind of a split pass.  I was almost passed (or not) when the timer went off.

Office Hours Partner: Mike

We went over that split pass and he showed me how the posture was different.  It was something that he picked up from the Ryan Hall guard pass DVD that I hope to borrow when he's done with it.  Also to finish the split pass he used windshield wiper to move off to the side.