March 27th, 2008 by admins

Jump Guard: start in the standing position, grab your opponent’s gi by the tricep and collar area. Right leg jumps around his waist, left arm goes around his neck, supporting yourself and left leg follows wrapping around his waist and lock your feet together.

Half Guard to an Arm Bar: when you are in your opponents half guard, he is wanting to escape and crawl around to your back, to prevent this from happening spin into him to keep him on his back. Your left arm should be around his neck and my arm should be pinning his arm to my body. When you are ready turn into him and get your left elbow below his trapped arm, below his elbow, grab your gi collar. With your right arm push down extending his arm for the arm bar. there should be pressure on his chest with your chest. it’s very important to get your elbow below his elbow.

Breaking Guard: When you are in your opponents guard, grab hold of his pants, keep your elbows in, scootch back using your knees and curl your back breaking his lock. place your right leg over his left leg to keep it in place and swing your left leg as far back as possible.

Another technique in breaking the guard is controlling your opponents arm by pressing it down on his guts. Place your left foot by his hip and then your right and do a squat. Keep holding on to his arm sleeve and with your left arm push down on his right leg to break the guard. Keep pressure on his arm and walk over his leg for side control.

Rolled: I rolled with Derek, it was pretty evenly matched, I was able to escape and mount him but I couldn’t do anything else from there. I tried doing a wrist collar choke but Derek had really good defense.

Mop showed me how I could have done something different to finish Derek. Grabbing Derek’s gi by the collar and pressing down and grabbing his tricep, loosen on the mount and turn him over to his side. Quickly place your left knee to his back and press down on his shoulder with your weight. Slide your hand under his head and grab his right arm and choke him out.

Next person was MopHead. He took it easy on me, he could make me tap anytime he wanted to. He did teach me a nice way to protect my neck and that is by just cupping my head with my hand, almost like I am doing a crunch. Do not try to defend using your arms against his legs when he has you from the back.

March 22nd, 2008 by admins

Today was a good day. I went to Saturday open mat and learned some take downs while standing. From the clinch position we learned how to take the opponents back and take them down. We learned how to control the opponent while holding the gi and posting the elbow to his chest or wrap your hand around the back of his neck.

 I rolled with Dima (sp?) first and I was able to make him tap, twice, once with an arm across the face choke and the other was a wrist choke. Something we learned from last class.

I got to roll with 2 other guys that I met that day and they beat me pretty soundly. I think I tapped out on armbars. 

March 18th, 2008 by admins

We learned 3 ways on how to break some ones grip when you have them in your guard.

1. When your opponents has his hands on you, grab both his wrists, turn and pull up.

2. pop his sleeve up and grab it with your left hand, pull it over your head, while threading your right arm upwards around his neck.

3. make a cable grip around his hands and pull upwards.

When doing all this be sure to pull him with your hips, this causes him to move forward.

From there we learned to go to an omoplata, if your opponent escapes, we transitioned to an armbar, if we screw up the armbar, we move onto a foot lock but you have to be pretty fast to set this up.

To set up the foot lock, you need to grab and keep it close to your body, control it with both hands. Place your thumb below the bone of his big toe and your pinky by his foot pinky. With your left arm wrap it around his ankle and grab your right wrist and make his toes point towards his heel, while doing this twist your chest to add more pressure.

Rob, made me tap quite a few times.

March 16th, 2008 by admins

I learned some new techniques from Ramsey (a kid I just met, this dude has a lot of wrestling experience). He showed me to pull on my opponents sleeve and grab it and shove my hand under it and thru to close the space between me and my opponent. We worked on transitioning from the armbar to the triangle and onto the omoplata.

March 13th, 2008 by admins

Today we were shown transitions from the armbar to the triangle and onto the omoplata.

Great class!