Mizblog

Greggo’s Thursday morning class. We warmed up with a cooperative roll. I took turns doing two position advances with Daniel, who returned after a long absence.

Then we learned how to remove the kick stand. Double sleeve grip, raise hips, punch both hands away while lowering the hips, then pull the arm across their body. At the same time, you’re hipping out away from that arm, reaching a hand over to grab their lat and hold them down. Once they’re down, they aren’t getting that arm back, so you can get up to your elbow, then up to your hand, and elevate your hips. With your far leg blocking their far leg at mat level, you use your near foot and arm to hip bump them over, keeping pressure to keep that arm across their body.

From there, you can do an arm bar. Reach your lat-holding hand over to grab their crossed-over arm’s wrist, then slip your near hand under that arm to grab your own arm in a figure-4 grip. Bring your back knee to pillow their head, and tuck your other foot into their armpit. You can pull up while scissoring your forearms together for a neck crank, or you can clear your lower arm from around their head and use it to push their head down as you lean your weight onto their chest to get your foot from behind their head around to the front, hooking their face/neck and squeezing your knees together on their trapped arm. Then you simply unfold it and hyper-extend the elbow for the tap.

If the hip bump doesn’t work, there’s a complex move that takes the momentum generated by their resistance to sweep them the other way. For this one, you do the same setup as before and try the hip bump sweep. If it doesn’t work, reach the lat hand around to grab their near collar at the neck. With that grip secured, you dive your shoulder under them and grab for their near leg, essentially doing a pendulum sweep on them, coming up in an S-mount with the near collar of their gi wrapped around their neck and held by the hand under the neck. Hook their far arm with your foot as you maintain control of their near leg with your pendulum sweep grip. You can choke them by simply pulling the collar, or you can get the arm bar while holding their far leg.

We rolled after that. I started with Daniel, who promptly took my back and choked me out. Then we started over and I struggled to pass his guard, got on top of him, and almost finished a kimura on him. I should have held his head down to keep him from turning in, I guess.

Next I rolled with Pat. I felt like I did pretty good at maintaining my guard. I kept a pretty good elbow-knee frame to keep him from securing side control, and went for a kimura from the bottom, but he defended and I let it go. I was able to recover guard twice (though I’m sure he let me – he was not working hard) and mostly felt pretty good.

Next I rolled with Greggo, who wanted to try the move of the day on me. I was able to defend it by putting both of my arms on one of his, and eventually stifled his attempt. He reset his guard and again controlled my sleeve. This time he swept me, but I was able to (he let me) sweep him. From side control, I gripped his far elbow like we learned on Tuesday, and he was about to talk me through the straight arm bar when I stepped over for the step-over arm bar. He was impressed. :)

Next I went with Jeremy, who was having his 6th class. I asked him to show me what he knows, and he started applying an Americana from my closed guard. I showed him why that was a bad idea by sweeping out his leg and taking his back. I showed him how to do that, then how to apply pressure from the back, and how to do a RNC.

Next round I sat out, and the following round I went with Andrew. We had a good roll but he got my neck. I tried to get a Von Flue choke but he turned under and cranked the choke. As I was tapping, my neck cracked and the muscles spasmed. I had to sit out the rest of the roll and put ice on my neck.