Venue: LA Gym, Bristol
Instructor: Chico Mendes
Warm up: Laps of the mat, including ass kicks, knee ups, facing inward for a couple of laps, facing out for a couple of laps, running backwards while striking for a couple of laps.Then into some push ups x 40 and then sit ups for a minute, elbow to opposite knee sit ups for a minute, cross choke sit ups for a minute, then finished with shrimping x 40 with the last 10 done really quick. After that we weren't cold any more.
The focus of Chico's lesson today was maintaining control. He started off mounting Raphael (Heck, Chico's demonstration partner) and demonstrating the importance of tight leg control around your opponents torso/hips. By gripping you knees into your opponent you are preventing him from getting his elbows in and making it difficult for him to perform the hip escape to Half Guard. He moved it on from there to show us his preferred method of controlling your opponents legs using your legs. He says if you wrap your legs around over the top of your opponents, then just cross your feet underneath, you have the best method of maintaining balance on your opponents without tying yourself down to him and giving him avenues for escape.
He went on to show us how important he feels removing the opponents grips is and the quick yanking method he uses to pull the grips off. We then went on to drill mount control.
Next Chico explained his thought on the opponent performing the hip escape on you, where he pushes the leg on one side, shrimps away from it and pulls a leg up and out into half guard. Chico feels that if your opponent is looking like escaping this way it is better to give up the mount for side control, rather than lose mount to half guard. With this in mind he lifts the lower leg up and switches it across the grounded opponents body using the foot to hook the outside part of the guys leg taking away the chance of him being able to shrimp out to half guard. Now if the opponent attempt to wrap his legs around what is left there, all he's got is your knee. Chico then goes on to show us how to safely secure a strong side control from there, how to re-establish mount from there and even why you should flip around into the opposite side control if the guys looks to hip escape on the other side when you're re-establishing mount.
We drilled these moves for a while longer then Chico introduced the S Mount to it. When the floored opponent attempts to escape to one side you can simply switch around so you're almost at a 90 degree angle to him, with one leg (the leg on the side he attempted to escape) over the top of his body with the foot flat on the floor the other side. You other leg will be knee to the floor nearly behind your opponent. From this position you can secure the collar for a bow and arrow choke, force an arm around his head and scoop up then cable grip for a nice rear naked or just grab hold of the opponents top arm at the wrist using your opposite side arm around his head. This last position is (rather crinchingly) referred to as the "gift wrap" over in the states and can be used to pull your opponent over so you have his back with hooks in, perfectly sitting up for several cool fight winning chokes.
We drilled this last lot quickly then went on to situational sparring where you start from mount and have to maintain control. If the floored guy manages to recover guard or escape your top control somehow you have to do 10 push ups at the end. Then you switch round and go from the bottom. We did this a few times and I was fairly pleased with the fact that I didn't have to do a single push up :o)
After this we had some excellent sparring. 7 minute rounds. Very intense and I'm pleased to say that my cardio (against all odds) held out very well. I was not really breathing heavy at the end and could've gone on for longer. I also managed to hit a rather tasty Omoplata against Shabbi, one of the more talented and experienced white belts present. Now Shabbi has been showing vast improvements in his rolling recently and has also entered himself for the Hereford Open in February. At 76 Kilos he was certainly handling himself well against a me, a guy of superior weight and experience level. He insisted we start off with me on mount over him and went on to show amazing defence against whatever I threw at him, eventually managing to recover to half guard. I eventually ended up with him in my guard and managed, after ages of trying, to lure him into putting one of his arms around me. From there I pulled the leg up and over, first threatened a gogoplata, then hit the omoplata. Magic. I was chuffed. That's another one of my Bjj aims done.
All in all cool class tonight with good rolling after. This may be my last class for a while as I am on call next week. So my ability to train depends on how well the weather holds up. If it's bad I'm likely to be out on the roads. :o(
Ah well, there'll always be the week after. Cheers guys. \m/
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