Davi Ramos Seminar

With the UFC in town and some due diligence from Ben Landwear and Henry Ems, we were fortunate to have Davi Ramos give a fantastic seminar at our gym. 

He is an ADCC champ as well as an MMA fighter for the UFC with many more accolades.  Further more, he was very friendly, personable, funny, and a great teacher. 

He recently did a podcast interview on Grappling Central that is worth a listen: http://grapplingcentral.com/episode-299-davi-ramos/

Highlight Video:

The techniques and positions he covered were a good mix of basics ending with some leg entanglement work.  I especially liked the small details about a few of the basics that I didn't know.

Passing the Gward

Davi has a very tight passing strategy. We worked from top half guard controlling the legs first then moving up to the hips and finally the arms and head.  He talked about using his finger tips to assist with gripping in no gi.

The first drill consisted of getting the underhook and placing our hand in the middle of the opponent's back and then flattening them with a cross face. The hand on the back part was new to me. Then he emphasized closing the legs tight.

Back control

One of the best tips that I'm going to play around with is pinching the knees while in back control to keep them from turning their shoulders.

We worked on a modified body triangle with moving the foot between legs to avoid the escape.  The big takeaway for the RNC was to use your cheek to help push their head to assist getting the hand behind neck

Kimura

Starting back from our tight top position in half guard we worked on getting the kimura grip and the Davi showed us the back take he used in his recent MMA fight.  We did a shoulder roll, maintaining the grip and when they get up executing kind of a chair sit motion back take. Another good detail here was to hook their shoulder to keep them from getting their back to the mat in transition.

From there he also showed us a vicious scissor choke if they don't try to get up out of the kimura trap.

Armbar from ADCC

Davi talked us through how he setup the armbar in the video below. By repeatedly tying up Lepri's neck and gauging his reactions, until he finally saw his moment to jump into the armbar. We worked on that for a while but I don't think I'll be pulling it off in open mat anytime soon. Well maybe on Mike Wilson.

Q & A

After this he opened it up for some questions. He talked us through his thoughts on half guard. He likes a shallow half with a good bottom hook. He also went over defending a triangle with hip positioning.

Leg Entanglements

I asked how does he decide when it's the right time to go for ankle locks? He showed several quick transitions that were very smooth. Ben seemed to be ready at any moment to tap.

Davi went back to the tight top half guard position and we drilled back step to toe hold, then rolling into knee bar. This is something I think I can incorporate into my game.  The last technique we worked on was back step to knee bar that they defend with a triangle, we then kind of moved to the saddle position and controlled the other leg to make a similar lock to the Texas Cloverleaf.