Continuing on from my write-up on the Checkmat Seminar I attended on Sunday at the Trojan Free Fighters MMA Gym in Cheltenham, Gloucester. In the last post I explained what happened in the No Gi segment of the training camp. This time I'll tell you what happened (from my perspective) in the Gi part of the day. As mentioned previously, the day was attended by Checkmat Bjj Black Belts Chico Mendes, Rafael Heck and the visiting Valmyr Neto from Kent.
After the half hour interval (just enough time to zip down the local Co-op and buy some bananas) we quickly got changed into our GIs and hit the mats. We went straight into techniques this time. Once again Valmyr was demonstrating and talking through the technique using Chico as his grappling dummy. Keeping with the Half Guard theme, this time we hit the Deep Half but as a twist the focus was on attacking/passing Deep Half.
Deep guard break to arm bar
Neto showed us this first technique starting from in Chico's Deep half guard, so that's Neto in a kind of scissor split with one leg extended, the other bent. Chico is lying on his side facing the same direction as Neto, with his legs wrapping around Neto's extended leg and his top arm wrapped around Neto's bent leg. From there, Neto ensures his extended leg is out of Chico's locked legs to past his knee, grips Chico's sleeve at the wrist and falls forward onto his knee and front bringing Chico's arm forward extended, then grips around the arm, turns the knee inwards so your weight is pressing your side on his arm and pulls back on the hyper extended arm for the arm bar submission.
I was fortunate enough to drill this move with Dan 'Grizzly' Adams, from our (SJJA) Taunton/Wellington class. Dan is an old training partner of mine, we started Jiu Jitsu in the same month and always used to drill the techniques at the old Burnham class together. Training with Dan was a good opportunity to catch up on stuff and have a laugh and we both found the technique fairly easy, although we seemed to be drilling it for a spectacular amount of time with Neto going around each pair to ensure they both had the technique right.
Deep half break to armbar attempt to rear mount
From the same position, the exact same manoeuvres all the way up to pulling the arm forward when you fall forward but in this variation Chico manages to free the arm at the last second. Neto then reaches around with his hand (the one that had just been holding Chico's sleeve) and grabs Chico's gi pant leg at the knee. Using the leverage from this, Neto can kick his leg (the one secured by Chico's arm not his legs) out from Chico's grip and swivels his body around at a 90 degree angle facing Chico's side. Neto and Chico then sshowed us that the natural reaction to this move from the position Chico was is was to come up on his knees. At this point you have an ideal opportunity to take his back with either side rear mount with arm over back, or a full rear mount. Neto explained that while attaining the rear mount position it is best to go to a seat belt style grip of the opponents torso for maximum control as your leg hooks are not guaranteed. Sometimes you may get this position with a kind of half guard from behind style leg lock. Keep this for control until you can risk releasing it to attain both hooks for the full rear mount.
Once again we drilled this move to death for a very long time. After that we were, as with the no gi, put into situational sparring. Half guard, top and then bottom for 2 minutes against each opponent with the object being to sweep or submit from the bottom or pass or submit from the top. Once again I will overstate the fact that this drill only proved one thing to me.
I MUST GET BETTER AT HALF GUARD!!
I rolled like this against Dan first who enjoyed great success passing my very weak half guard and managed to sweep me a couple of times to boot. I would now very much like to spar normally against Dan just to prove I'm not a total pushover. Next time I hope.
I also rolled against a few other guys with this situational half guard style. There was one guy called Paul, a white belt from Kent, who I managed to sweep and Shabbi, one of our Checkmat guys from the Bristol class, I managed to get a sweep and pass against. Other than that though I pretty much had a hard time. I was relieved at the end when the said we could go for a straight face to face roll. In fact I kind of took my frustrations out a bit on poor Dwaine by tapping him 3 times in about 5 minutes. I was hoping for a roll against Dan too but we were only given the opportunity to roll the once.
After all that we had a piccie taken then had a little chat whilst getting changed, thanked Neto for the awesome instruction and said our goodbyes to the Kent lot (who all seemed like a great bunch of lads) and left.
I'm the muppet in the middle who couldn't look the right way when the picture was taken.
All in all a great seminar that gave me some good techniques to work with but also asked as many questions of me as were answered. Yes, I need to learn more half guard techniques. Yes, I need to learn how to pass half guard better. Yes, my half guard currently sucks. At least it gives me a clear learning goal.
I MUST GET BETTER AT HALF GUARD!!
At least I learnt something really big I can take home with me! \m/
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