take the blues away

After my 100% crap performance on Friday, I was looking forward to a quiet Saturday class to get back on track. That pretty much worked out.

We had another small class. There were two newbies and a blue belt who used to train at our school, but I've never seen him in all the time I've been there. Apparently he had a long time off. The two big boys were paired, and I ended up working with the same guy as last Saturday.

Similar to last week, we worked stuff off the lap drill. But this time we started with a lapel choke from side control, using our own lapel fed around their neck to choke them. Then we worked that in with the lap drill.

After that, we did some guard passing, using the under the leg pass. From there, they were shown the knee through pass as and alternative, if the bottom person makes a heavy leg. And from there, how to deal with the heavy leg by either flipping it over the head or making a gable grib before stacking and then passing around it backwards. From there, back to side control, we had the option to attack with the choke again, from our previous mini drill.

We played with these things for the rest of the class. And same as last week, I talked my partner through a lot of it, explaining bits here and there and making sure he kept on pressure, kept his base, didn't expose elbows etc.

I plainly didn't have time to contemplate my shortcomings of the previous evening, particularly as I also served as the demo dummy. So that was good. The icing on the cake was when my partner thanked me profusely for helping him. I said that's ok, we all help each other. But he insisted that I was very clear in how I showed him things and my explanations were useful, and that he was happy. That made me happy :-)