April 22nd 2016 - Gi All Levels

Theme & Techniques: Double Leg Takedown, Mount Upa Escape & Cross Collar Choke
Partner: Ryal, Craig

More double leg help with my partners today.  I feel like having to go over the steps with so many people this week has helped me even more.  Especially when I demonstrate it I feel like I need to make it look at least like I know what I'm doing. 

For the cross collar choke I feel good about it sometimes and then other times I don't.  Most of it, I think, has to do with different collars and how I grip them.  Often times it just feels like I can't get good grips without having my wrist bent or my fingers displaced.  So I'm still working on figuring that out, but at least now I think I know when I have it. 

Rolling: Stand-up, Mount, Free Rolling
Rolled With: Craig, Ben (visitor), Ryal, Josh J

We did some stand-up sparring again and I felt pretty good.  I went for double leg but I was too far away and Craig was able to sprawl on me.  I was able to get a hold of his leg though and turn the corner and eventually finish it out.  We talked about being a little more gassed with stand-up mostly because we aren't as comfortable there.

Ben is visiting from Colorado and has trained there for a while and was the one that got Josh J. into training.  We trained the mount position together and I ended up giving him some advice about moving higher from the top and some things that help me like floating and letting the bottom person move a little bit.  Always cool to have visitors from other schools.

Josh has been getting better at defending the submissions that I'm good at.  So I either need to get sneakier or find other submissions to setup and get good at. 

Office Hours Partner: Josh, Conan

After class Conan drilled a few butterfly guard transitions to x-guard and then led into some of my deep half stuff.  He had a couple of ah-ha moments and seemed interested in going over more deep half in the future.  Hopefully I can get him into it.

Rolled with Josh again and decided to be a little more aggressive this roll and try not to give anything up.  I worked my way from sweeping to passing guard to mount and then started working on an armbar.  He was able to defend it and then stack me so I ended up in guard.  In the past I might have taken this as a regroup and start over point but I was able to transition right into a pendulum sweep and regain the top position again.  Now I need to figure out how to not get stacked in the first place.