Monday 1/29/18
BJJ 105 min
Last class of the month before moving on to the mount position in February. We finished our month of guard work with chokes. First, we warmed up with stretches, ab work and shrimping and rolling across the mats.
First technique was the cross collar choke. Break down the posture, peel collar back with left hand while feeding right hand as deep as possible. Hip to your left, slide your off-hand underneath, feeding as deep as you can on the opposite side collar. Rotate your hands inward, pull your hands together, pull their torso as close to you as possible, row with your lats to finish the choke. If done well, you’ll have the choke when you rotate your hands and pull just a little. The rest of the motion is for when you’ve got less-than-ideal grips.
Next technique was the chainsaw choke. You’ve sunk your first hand as deep as you can, but they defend the cross-collar choke by preventing your hand from sliding in. You can cycle your hand around their neck and grab the shoulder portion of the gi to finish the choke.
Next up was a lapel choke. Get your right hand deep cross-collar first. Free the left-side lapel (or wait until the gi is untied to set this up). Using the left hand, pull the lapel over the neck and finish the choke.
If that is defended, use your right hand to grab the lapel and shift your left-hand grip to palm-up. Cycle your right hand around the neck, grabbing whatever material you can on the shoulder. Finish the choke.
Next up was an arm-drag with the lapel. If they are postured up on your hips, get hold of their lapel with your right hand and wrap it as high as you can on their arm. Then you pull hard, like an arm drag with the gi, finishing with a stiff-arm to keep them off to the side. Reach up and over their neck with your left hand, grabbing ahold of the gi. From there you slide your right hand in a karate-chop position along the carotid artery of the right side of their face. Pull the gi with your left hand to finish the choke.
There’s also a sweep available from here. If you’ve wrapped the arms with the gi and broke their posture down on on your right side, swim your right hand down behind their knee to grab the hamstring. From here you can tug on the gi and roll them over really easily, finishing with the same karate-chop/pull on the gi motion or move to other types of fun like an armbar or bow-and-arrow choke.
It was a lot of drilling, but I did all of the techniques well and I’m still recalling it all after a few hours and two white russians. That has to be a good sign.
Rolling was brief. Our young and athletic blue belt from another school returned, and we had a draw. I was very close to getting him in an Americana, but he did a good job of defending. 5 min draw.
Next roll was with the black belt instructor. It turned into a one-on-one lesson, and we worked on sweeping with a leg pick when the scissor sweep goes wrong and we worked on shifting to reverse keza ketami from side-control in order to neutralize an arm. I’ve done this before in live rolling but I learned a new detail today about using my knee to keep their elbows off the mat.
The visiting blue belt also signed up for February, so I’ve hopefully got a new training partner who I match up well with. Great stuff. I can’t wait for Thursday’s class!