Mizblog

After KM96 I changed in the small room and jumped on the mat just after Greggo explained what flow rolling is and they all partnered up and got started, so I got to partner with Greggo! I felt like I was letting him down by not recognizing the opportunities he was leaving open for me, but we wobbled around a bit and he taught me an open guard sweep of a standing opponent. Cool!

Then we switched partners, and everybody switched around, leaving me and Greggo without a partner, so we flowed again. I almost got him with the sweep he taught me! I’ll just say that I went easy on him because he’s doing a tournament on Saturday. Right?

After that, we learned to move our opponent around with grips on lapel and sleeve. Greggo taught me to really lift that sleeve gripped arm when steering wheeling someone.

Our next drill was just taking grips. I felt a little more confident this time than I did last time. Still not good, but I did okay.

We then used standard grips to do a snap down to blast double leg takedown. We practiced just the entry for a bit, and then we tried it on the crash pad, first just getting them down, and then moving on to side control.

That done, we did some take down sparring. I partnered with Matt, Yas, Josh, Jen, and TJ. Yas is a sparring dummy. Matt’s back was tweaked. Josh did a fun flying back take and I dropped him (slowly). Jen practiced her hip toss on me, even though there’s no way she’s ever going to hip toss me with my long legs. Other people tried to hip toss me, but I was able to move my center of gravity back just far enough that they couldn’t lift me.

After that was over, we did rolls from side control. I rolled with Matt, and he tapped me from squeezing my jaw. Hope that doesn’t bother me later. I tried to tap early, but maybe not early enough. He’s really good at getting his legs in, and he uses his arms to push you toward his legs.

Yas is a grappling dummy. I taught him how to make his side control heavy and to control the head with his shoulder.

Andrew was a fun roll. We were pretty evenly matched, though I was able to get into dominant positions with him. I was really careful with his arm because he was severely injured and out for months with a tendon tear.

Last roll was with TJ, who swept me beautifully, and arm barred me before teaching me a good Americana setup. Also fun. :)

Overall I was quite happy with my performance. I’m still terrible, but I was able to put to use some of the stuff that Rick taught me on Saturday. That gave me a lot of confidence, though I did find myself having difficulty finishing passes, especially with Matt. I’ll figure him out though. Eventually…