choked by a sadist

On Friday night, instead of our regular BJJ class, we had a two hour seminar with John Campbell, nicknamed "The Sadist". It was no gi/mma. John recently returned from the States where he trained with Eddie Bravo. We knew we were in for an interesting evening :-)

We learned the lockdown from halfguard bottom which seems pretty much like a grapevine. Then we worked on getting double underhooks through a technique called jaws of life. Basically, you push your partner's head up and away by placing your hands on his temple. You rotate your free arm in, with your elbow/forearm in line with your sternum, to fill the space created. That allows you to suck down your other forearm (which was underhooked). From there you can have double underhooks and lock him down with a gable grip around his back. In mma, burying your head in his neck or chest will pretty much prevent him from hitting you.

Then we learned the old school sweep, which included transitioning the lockdown foot position to where his lower leg is trapped in the crook of my knee. As I push him over by grabbing his foot, the crucial part is to step backwards with my free leg while having my shoulder on him, and holding his foot. Then, depending on positioning, I pull out or slide out my other leg and establish side control. Very neat.

If we can't grab his foot, we can get up on our right arm while maintaining the left hand across his back and hooked on his far hip. Then drive into him to sweep. If he has whizzered our left arm, we can rotate the hand and limp arm out of it, swing it clean over his left shoulder and go straight to a seat belt grip, insert our right foot for a hook and have the back. Lovely.

After that we went through head arm chokes from side control. Learned a nice and easy way to peel out the right elbow and trap his upper arm with our head while going to mount. After that, we have a number of options for making the choke work, each cinching it tighter. So if he doesn't tap to version 1, we transition to 2 etc. Essentially, if a plain head/arm choke doesn't work, we can go from the standard left hand on right bicep, right hand on head position to a double hands on elbows postiion. Either way, we make it tight by driving our head towards the mat, tightening the elbows, and pushing our chest out. If that doesn't do the trick, we slide our left foot across his belly, with the foot hooking his right hip. Then we stick our right foot on our left or on his hip. And push down with our feet. That adds considerable force to the choke. The final version was to transition to knee ride, with the knee high on the sternum. That was not nice, to put it mildly.

The whole sequence is nasty because you just go from one evil thing to another, cinching it tighter and tighter and making it more and more unpleasant. John was walking around checking how we all went and offered to let us have a feel. I accepted :-). OUCH. It's choke with a bit of a neck crank, more of a crank with the feet on your hip. Ouch. (Note: don't accept a sadist's offer to choke you while sticking his knee in!)

Finally we did a bit on back control and how to bring up your legs to trap one arm. From there we might have a clear run at a RNC. Or we figure four the other arm. Alternatively, we transition to an armbar. I think he called that the black widow.

It really was a very interesting evening. Most of us had a bit of a roll after, and a couple of opportunities came up to try those new things. Luckily, my legs are long and flexible enough for that sort of stuff. And it was good that we did all that work with the head/arm choke, as we had beeen drilling the same choke several times during the week. So for me personally, it really opened my eyes for a whole new attack game. Good stuff indeed :-)

I hear that John will be back and I'm looking forward to it.