Queensland and Brazil Floods

So my home city of Brisbane QLD just received the worst floods in 35 years. Scores of people dead and many thousands without power in the middle of a capital city!  Brazil was hit even worse,  mass landslides.  Luckily the flood for Brisbane was 1 metre lower than expected.  For my gym this made all the difference and it escaped any water damage.

I’ve noticed a trend in lessons that I hadn’t noticed before.  At my gym we do a lot of lessons based on submission but very little on passing or escaping. I think the ratio is the wrong way around. To me, what’s the point of the submission if I’m struggling to assert any type of control over my opponent.  I know the principles you hear of defend/attack but still I need to spend more time escaping and passing before I can get to submission attempts.

That being said I’ve been working on Arm Bars the last couple of weeks.  I’m trying to work one that involves set ups off successful scissor sweeps or failed scissor sweeps.  I just need to drill it out more to feel comfortable attempting it.  I’ll probably also start working on a combination from the flower sweep in closed guard.

Dan

The Process of Rebuilding my Guard

Sometimes to move forward you have to tear down what you already have and rebuild.  Fix the foundation so to speak.  In my case I can compare my old guard game like a skyscraper made out of match sticks where it was so fragile that it would come crashing down at the slightest hint of a breeze.  Sure, it had a lot of facets to it, but it wasn’t sturdy or reliable. I’ve gone back and looked at a lot of my techniques in Guard, thrown out most and slowly tried to develop a plan for guard that involves good basic technique without the bells and whistles.  It’s now a modest house, but at least I can live in it.

My requirements were:

• Closed Guard only, no open guard, half guard, De La Riva, X-Guard, Butterfly Guard etc
• Gi and No Gi Grips (while using a Gi)
• Exploiting Resistance with Timing, no strength battles.
• Fundamental Sweeps (Scissor, Hook, Sitting Roll Over and Scoop Sweeps)
• Good Defence against passes (under, around, through and over) from both closed guard and a compromised unlocked guard.

I have to say, Point 3 is the hardest but what I consider the most important for everything Jui-Jitsu.  I rediscovered a lot of the essential concepts again going through this process.  My journey roughly involved the follow training area’s over many training sessions.

1. Getting Grips
2. Breaking Posture
3. Effective use of timing  to exploit the grip fight, posture battle, strength, stacks etc
4. Timing Submission attacks
5. Through passes, and counters to these
6. Compromised broken guard and counters to passes around or over
7. Timing sweep attacks
8. Putting it all together

I’m really glossing over details here, but honestly I found having a methodical process really helped.  The most important question I now ask myself is, what is the path of least resistance to get what I ultimately want.  Some things I rediscovered to a deeper personal understanding through this, and I guess to some degree I’ve taken ownership of these concepts.  They include:

1. Frames, creating and maintaining space
2. Timing, real jiu-jitsu is in the transitions using your opponent’s movement against them.
3. Resistance Drilling to improve timing,  seriously I should have done this years ago.
4. Grips, you don’t have control without them.
5. Don’t Fight muscle with muscle – it’s so easy to do subconsciously.
6. Always Attack when you have guard.
7. Move those hips, get to the side.

Anyway, from where my Closed Guard was technique wise, I now feel it’s far improved. I don’t rely on one trick ponies anymore. It’s consistent and I feel that sticking to basic techniques has actually made me a lot more creative and dangerous.  So overall for the time being I’ve accomplished my mission with Closed Guard.

I will start focusing on Side Control to Mount for the next month or so.  Really my plan is sweep, pass, mount, choke.  I’m going to explore every avenue in achieving the goal of pass. For revision in warm ups I will incorporate some of the cooperative resistance drills for Closed Guard to keep my timing sharp.

Dan

My Love Affair with Sweeps

Part of the last few days I’ve spent a fair bit of time drilling my guard sweeps and going over the basics of them.  The basics are fair from simple when it comes to sweeps.  You can’t really force a sweep. I want to make my sweeps feel effortless for me and my partner - I’m finding the best time is in the transitions of attacking and defending from guard.  Feeling where their weight is committed.

So with that in mind I’ve gone through the basics again of Scissor Sweep, Sitting Rollover sweep, Rolling Shoulder sweep and the Hook Sweep with all starting from closed guard.  They all have advantages and difficult timings.  I’m trying to identify for myself the exact timings to use on each one and also the likely blockages when I’m not doing the technique correctly.

For instance what I’m working on mainly is Scissor Sweep.  I picked this sweep specifically because:

1. I like it
2. I can get it but not as often as other sweeps
3. Rickson Gracie likes it, and there is a good chance he will be teaching it in his seminar soon.

So what are some of the challenges I face for the Scissor Sweep?

1. Partner puts all his weight down very low, to stop me from getting his weight onto my shin
2. Opponent pushes down the knee the is across the belly pinning it
3. Opponent doesn’t open his leg to the side that benefits me transitioning from closed guard to Scissor Sweep.

Still with these challenges I’ve also had some good wins with it.  Mainly the following little tips

1. Grip, get it first before anything.
2. Timing – Anticipate and feel their reaction
3. Space,  don’t get cramped and have no room to move.
4. Push Pull action to load up their weight onto your shin.
5. Feel where their weight and posture is, understand it
6. Drive with your grip hand and commit to coming up onto your knees into mount.
7. All sweeps have a window of opportunity,  transition once that window is gone.

Denial vs Permission

One of the main things I’ve been looking at is the ability to use my grips effectively.  It’s tough to break someone down in the guard.  Naively we start out trying to pull the person down, then pull the person down while disrupting their posts, finally pull the person down while disrupting their posts and using your legs. I was okay at this, generally I was strong than most people, and all those three things made it easy for me.  However it’s a hard fight, and I’m trying to re-assess every part about how I think and perform in Jiu-Jitsu.

So I give them what they want now. I saw a very nice video of Renzo Gracie showing how to get a really deep grip from guard – unfortunately I can’t find it anymore! In essence the technique was to get up on one elbow and straight-arm push the persons shoulder with your other arm.  They react by pushing back, which in turns gives you the nice deep grip from guard. 

The principal behind the technique is more interesting though. He wants the deep grip, he them what they want to actually get what he wants…the deep grip.  So for me I’ve found pushing the person away, and threatening to do a sitting roll over sweep or switch out really forces them to willing come forward breaking their own posture.  Even once I’ve got the grip now, I try threaten their posture in all other directions including back, left and right.  If they aren’t stable, they fall over and I get an easy sweep.  Generally though, they have to react to keep stable, and that reaction is what I’m learning to exploit.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, once you’ve got the grip attack their base with it.  Don’t resist what they are doing, but take it to the extreme end of what they are doing.  If they want to try to break your grip, no problem as they push your hand away, you can release your grip and pull their arm for an arm drag.  If they sit back, no problem go with it and push them backwards.  If they try to hunker down, no problem…pull them in tight and attempt to submit them, above all force a reaction game to occur. 

Don’t fight in the opposite direction, use what they are giving you.  If the person really wants to sit up well you might as well give him what he wants and more – it’s not like you are easily going to be able to break that guys posture down as he will try to deny you that.  Instead don’t deny him the ability to keep posturing up,  give him permission by pushing him away in such a way that he no longer wants to sit up.  Guarantee they won’t expect it, as our natural reaction is one of denial and not permission.

Get a Grip

Sometimes choice is a bad thing.  Ever gone to an ice-cream store and been inundated by choice,  so many flavours and textures.  The saturation of choice often leaves me confused,  over-whelmed and unable to make a decision.  Needless to say I’ll branch out to include chocolate and occasionally mango or a berry flavours…and that’s it. What you won’t get out of me is choosing the pineapple chunks with Rhubarb choice! So I choose chocolate except there are 5 different types of chocolate which involves even more choices and decisions,  if I take the “World Class” one I’m then left feeling that I might have missed the better “traditional” choice..

As you can see, where I’m from ice-cream selection is serious business.  Jui-Jitsu is similar,  often times I will flounder in guard trying to break the guy down and just not get anywhere.  I was taught this was step 1, but my breaking down had zero focus on grips and so I floundered.  I didn’t think about grips or have a go to grip, and because of that I stalled and never committed to one. I was left with whatever grips fell into my hands so to speak.  This lead me to have a very hard game for me to analyse and improve on.  I had zero consistency and for a long time couldn’t figure out why.

As such, I’ve gone back to basics in this area.  That is I will try to get either the same gi or no-gi grip and that’s it. I only train with Gi btw.  I am slowly finding this is a good way to really delve deeply into the details.  It’s far less confusing as I know what my choice is and I can focus on getting it reliably and what the likely problems are that I will encounter.  The great thing about this is, if a person is really stuffing my grip I’ll ask them to show me what they are doing and can we drill it, then I ask them to help find the counter to the counter!

It’s slow work for me,  I don’t have time to dedicate to BJJ every day but I do want to improve.   Another aspect is that I previously thought of grips as just my hands/arms.  Also, I now realise that my legs/feet are grips too, often equally if not more important than my hands.  I now look at closed guard as a grip with my legs, or mount as a grip with my legs and feet. 

So my basic tip is this.  Pick a grip, a fundamental and basic grip and make it your go to grip. Use it, explore and understand every nuance of it and every counter to the counter-grips people might employ.  Above all else, get a grip!

Dan