Mizblog

Greggo’s Saturday morning class. I had to leave early to get cleaned up and go to the valley, so only an hour of training, but it was good.

We started with a basic spider guard break and pass, but it included some very important concepts for approaching someone’s spider guard. For instance, spider guard is pretty useless against a standing opponent, unless they’re really short and you’re really tall. Another idea is that being on your knees is useless against spider guard. You should at least get up to one foot.

So the first pass involves getting tight grips on the outside of the pants, right near the knees, so you can also control them and move them around. They want to lift you and tip you over, so you want to move over toward the lifting side and roll them onto that side, so their extended leg is more horizontal than vertical, nullifying their advantage. You can then break their grip by lining their heel up with your knee to slide their foot off your bicep, allowing you to slip your hand under their leg and pin it down to the mat, then break their other grip somehow (I forget how) and pass under their other leg while you keep the original leg pinned to the mat.

The next pass involved standing and pulling back (again with the knee grips) and then getting into the pass we did last week, where you hold their feet to the mat as you step around them and slide into side control. You can also leapfrog their legs into mount, if you’re feeling spry.

The last pass was seriously brutal, but fun. Again, grip and stand, but this time you want to aim your grip to the back of the knee. Step back and pull your elbows together, and yank them forward so their butt slides down between your legs. You then sit on their hamstrings, which are pressed to their chest below you. From the bottom, it really sucks, and my sore rib was crying as Greggo used me to demo the move. Anyway, once you’re sitting heavy on them, you reach across their feet to push their shin away from you as you kind of body surf down onto them and into side control.

We then did a guard passing drill from spider guard, where 4 people were in the middle and the rest lined up to try to pass their spider guard. If they got passed, the passer stayed in the middle and the middle person had to get back in line. If they swept, the passer got back in line. I gave and got a bit. Good fun.

Then we did top-bottom-out. I got grouped with TJ and Jared the blue belt. I actually did very good in that drill. TJ again got frustrated when his lasso sweep didn’t work on me (I was able to reach over with my free hand to keep him from tipping me over.) Before that fun was done, though, it was noon and I had to run.

TJ gave me his extra copy of Texas Holdem with Zombies, so I get to learn how to play that.