midweek

On Wednesday, in the small lunchtime class, we went trough attacks from side control.

We assumed the common scenario, where the far arm is around the back of our neck. We are in short base. Firstly, having established the postion, I could sit there for a second or two, with my left hand on my left ear, in case my opponent brings his right hand around the front of my face to push me off. In that case, I can just slam down my left to the floor, trapping his wrist and I'm set up perfectly for a figure four.

Alternatively, I can slide my right forearm under his left arm, making sure I'm high up in his armpit. I sit up and pull, so that he is on his right side. Immediately, I move my left knee over his head and push my shoulder down on his left arm. That pressure pushes his arm against the side of his ribcage, made worse by the fact that my forearm is in his armpit. It's not comfortable!

From there I have two options: armbar or figure four/kimura.

This makes a neat three option attack combination. I like it as I'm not a speed wiz, and it enables me to set up a nice tight armbar or figure four whilst staying in good base the whole time. I like it :-)

Did a brief free wrestle and was partnered with Sensei for the first time in a long time. Didn't take long before he had my back. I went for some time avoiding a RNC, but none of my usual escapes from back control worked. Just as I thought I finally could get out, I realised the little opening was just so he could get the other arm in. After I tapped and we talked about it, I realised that our time would have been better spent tapping earlier and spending time on other stuff. Like as in: as soon as I realised I couldn't get out of back control. Duh. So the only good thing that came out of it was that my defence is improving.

The second session was a brief rehearsal of the butterfly sweep we worked on a couple of classes ago. Then we were shown a cutting armbar from butterfly guard.

That though was only the lead-in or fake to get the opponent to turn his arm and leave it exposed for a sweep. I don't know what it was called, but it involved hipping out the the side opposite the trapped arm, cupping his chin and then hipping back in under him before rolling him over for the sweep. Don't know if I'll be pulling this one of in free wrestling for a while yet... But I'm only beginning to realise how many ways a person can get swept!

For the rest of the class, we did some free guard passing first. Had one of the bigger guys for a partner. Couldn't pass his guard for the life of me, and he swept me every which way. :-((

Then we did some free wrestling. Had a young guy with some grappling experience. I suppose it was unfair that some of us had taken the gi off (including mysef), and he still wore his gi top. We tumbled and rolled some with several interesting postions
here and there. My closed guard gave him a lot of grief :-). But in the end I did some fancy move from bottom turtle and got to switch back side control where an armbar did the trick. Don't ask me how that happened. I only remembered that I looked up at one of the guys who was watching and said: now was that an inspired move or what?? I'm such an idiot at times ;-)

Last guy was a very new guy, it was only his fourth class or so. So I ended ups showing him stuff and pointing out the danger of triangles during guard passes etc.

It doesn't seem so long ago that I was where he was :-)