BJJ 10.12.2009

Thursday's class was held by Juha, and he started us off with some quick but intense warm-up exercises to make us get more comfortable with our physical performance limits. We began with backwards ukemis (just falling on our backs, not rolling over) and doing the technical stand up. Then we formed pairs and did 40 reps of standard judo arm (or hip?) throws. I guess nobody was really tired at this point, but Juha had a surprise for us. Using the same pairs, we moved on to the ever-agonizing guard deadlifts with 20 reps for each, followed by another 25 reps without any time to rest. For a weakling like me, twenty is plenty. Fourty five is something else. Luckily, I had to skip a few of them because we had to suddenly reorganize our pairings halfway through the exercise. Some of the guys had hurt themselves earlier on, and straining their backs and legs proved to be unwise.

After the warm-up, we moved on to the first technique. It was an escape from a standing guillotine choke, which we had already gone through in the introductory course.

Pedro Sauer demonstrates the escape:


In the video, Pedro continues to an armbar, but we only took the side mount. Juha taught us a tip on what to do in case the other guy continues to hold the choke even after the takedown. First, you put your top hand (the one under your opponent's head) on the far side to prevent him from rolling you over. After you are stabilized in the side mount, bring the top hand to push his chin, slip the hand under his chin, and grab the back/shoulder muscle next to his neck. Now you can put all your weight on your forearm to press on his neck. This should make it easy to open the choke hold with your other hand.

The next technique was a transition from side mount to the knee mount. You start with your one hand grabbing the opponent's gi collar under his neck, and the other holding on to his pants on the far-side hip bone. Then you twist/roll the guy a little by lifting and pushing with your arms, and land in knee mount. Put all your weight on the knee and pull with your hands to make it miserable for your opponent. Juha told us that it's possible to get a tap simply by holding the knee mount tightly. Later, when I got the chance to roll with him and got to experience the misery, I completely agreed.

Now that we knew how to get to the position, we went through a couple of attacks from the knee mount.

The first one was a basic collar choke. To begin, you bring your lower hand next to the hand that is already holding the collar. The tricky part is to get the top hand to the other side. You can try to simply grab it quickly, but your opponent is likely to defend it by bringing his near-side arm up. If so, you push the arm away from you, to his neck. Next, he will probably resist the motion. At the very moment when he starts to turn back, you shoot your thumb inside his collar and drop your knee back to side mount for a choke.

The second attack was a spinning armbar. It's probable that the opponent tries to escape the knee mount by pushing on your knee. If he does, you hook his far-side elbow with your lower arm. Open your own elbow a little to straighten his arm, put your other hand on his exposed shoulder blade, and lift his shoulder off the mat. Step to the other side with your top leg, grab his pants to prevent him from escaping, and fall back into an armbar.

Here's a video of the spinning armbar, starting all the way from side mount:


At the end of class, we had time for two rounds of sparring. First, I matched with a ferociously aggressive guy, and we had an intense round with some nice high-speed sweeps. In the second round, I paired up with Juha. He has an effective way of teaching where he slowly but surely sets up submissions and gives tips on how to defend them. After a little while, he sneakily repeats the same motions to see if you remember how to react. I felt like I learned quite a lot in those five minutes, and in the end managed to protect myself from string of his powerful choke "attempts".