September 22nd 2015 - Gi Beginner

Theme & Techniques: Defend Guillotine from Guard, Ezekiel from Mount & Half Guard
Students: Bhuvana, Dave, Mo, Abdul, Ben, Morgan, Tom

Pulled out some different exercises for the warm-up today.  We did some partner shrimp walks where you push on your partners legs while they stand over you to assist with the shrimp.  Then front shrimps with a partner that I just remembered.  We did some back and forth takedown fitins, then some grip fighting from standing.

Some things I tried to focus on while teaching the techniques were:

• In order to defend the guillotine from guard you have to get ahead of them and stay ahead.  Getting to your toes and pushing them flat on their back before they can pull you down and move to the side is going to be key.  
• After releasing the choke pull your arms back along with your head and try to get your posture back.  Unless you like being armbared.
• For the Ezekiel I've been playing around with where to apply the choke.  I'm still not 100% that I have the best way, but I've had a lot of success with going across to the other side rather than just applying the choke to the near side. 
• From half guard, have the intention that you are going to pass to mount, make them take away their defense to block your knee to get a good shot at completing the choke.  

Rolling: Closed Guard (2 x 2 min), Half Guard (2 x 2 min), Free Rolling (5 min)
Rolled With: Tom, Ben

With uneven partners I was able to roll a few times.  Rolling felt pretty smooth, always love starting in mount on the top, plus half guard!  Both Ben and Tom did a good job at defending. 

During the free rolling round I did my best to give Abdul some pointers as he's only been to a couple of classes.  Most of my advice had to do with posture and preventing armbars and triangles from guard.  After class we talked about figuring out what the desired positions are and knowing when you're in trouble is what he needs to focus on first.

Office Hours Partner: Morgan

After rolling a couple times Morgan asked about how to go about passing guard from knees/butterfly.  I went over a couple passes that I like to do and discussed the grips I like to go for.  I've been working on dealing with avoiding the armdrag by kind of getting the grips and jumping the pass.