Thursday, July 8, 2010

I watched a purple belt grading

Last Saturday, we had a grading. I just went along for the fun. A few white belts got their first stripe. What was fun to watch was someone testing for purple belt.

He had to work hard, there were countless rounds of wrestling and then more and then some more... His technique is obviously good, as despite fatigue, he did really well. It really was impressive to watch. I was so pleased for him, too. He is one of the nicest guys in our school.

On the one hand it scares me to see what's expected, on the other hand, it's something to aspire to. Not that I need to worry about getting to that level for a few years yet....

I've been to four other classes.

Last Friday we warmed up as usual, but did some standing pummeling as well. Then we worked on the transition from lockdown to whip up to dogfight. Then attacks from dogfight, mainly electric chair and taking the back.

I had a couple of rolls. One with a heavy blue belt who tends to let me work instead of smashing me, but I have to work, so he's a great partner. The other roll was with a young guy who goes 110% every time. He doesn't seem to care for technique, it's all about forcing things with strength and speed, and he's always rattling on about some fancy killer technique he saw on youtube.... Gah. As one of the other guys said, thankfully Mr.110% doesn't come very often. I made a mistake, he got my back, and rather than having my jaw crushed, I tapped to his rnc. Before going home, I watched one of the blue belts taking him down a peg.

On Monday, we drilled four attacks from closed guard: armbar, triangle, take the back and a cross lapel choke. The choke setup is to overhook one arm and grab the far lapel. With this, we can control the posture of the person in our guard and the collar is anchored down. Also, he loses the use of one arm. With the other hand, we can then reach into the opposite collar and go for the choke.

Wednesday lunchtime, we also did cross lapel chokes. I worked with one of the very new guys, who was a bit timid and unsure to grab hold of my collar properly and choke hard. I assured him that I'd tap if it works, but he was still being super careful, when the instructor came over and gave him the "you should not be NICE to her" and "she will choke YOU" lectures :-) . After that, his chokes weren't bad.  In all, we drilled the choke from mount quite a bit, then we did three variations of grips for the same choke from closed guard.

On Wednesday evening, we worked on rubber guard and drilled the transition from mission control to chill dog (bleh, I hate those stupid names!) and then jiuw claw. We also looked into how we can get an armbar from mission control or chill dog. And how to get the triangle from mission control. I'm getting the hang of this stuff and it helps to have long legs and reasonable flexibility. The only issue I have sometimes is that due to the length of my legs, it can be hard to get my feet on their hips. But maybe I'm just not in a good position, maybe I need to adust by scooting up a bit first. Of course, having broken them down, it's hard to move myself, being sandwiched between mat and my partner's body. I think this needs a bit more work. But I have had success with rubber guard, so I'll keep working on it.

I had a couple of rolls. One thing I saw in some instructional the other day was to deflect people's arms as they are passing one's guard, this denies them the abiltiy to settle and gives me room to hip escape and regain guard. I tried that when the opportunity came up, and I had partial success. So that's something else I'm going to work on.

I've also been watching Rigan Machado's instructional on triangles, and without being aware of it, I started buggerising around with open guard, spider guard even and looked for a triangle. Then my partner laughed and said: funny, that looks like a Rigan move. Well, he's the guy who lent me the dvd :-)

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