BJJ 5.12.2009

Saturday's class was instructed again by Tommi. This time, we jumped straight into some new self-defense techniques without any intense warm-up aerobics. Friday night had been rather taxing, and I was glad that he didn't put us through a disciplined conditioning regime.

The first self-defense move was a takedown from a position where your opponent pushes your chest with a single palm. To take him down, you first stack your opposite hand on top of his to hold it in place. Then you grab his elbow with your other hand to control his whole forearm, and lean forwards with your body. This overflexes his wrist, and forces him to the ground.

The second technique began with the opponent grabbing your gi lapels with both hands at chest level. The first thing was to bring both your arms between the attacker's by doing a breast stroke swimming motion. Then you finish the swim stroke by looping your arms around his, trapping his elbows in your armpits. When you hold your hands together, this is a pretty tight control position. After gaining the control, simply step a little to the side, extend the leg that remains in the front of your opponent, sit down, and roll on top in mount.

Next, Tommi taught us a variation of the mount called the S mount. The basic idea is to let (or force) your opponent to turn on his side under your mount, and shift your legs to a good position. One knee goes to the back of his head and the other is planted (foot down, knee up) in front of him. This prevents your opponent from rolling away or bringing his knees close to his body.

A video demonstration of the position:


After getting into the S mount, we practiced a couple of attacks, all starting from the same position. We always started with the top arm hooking under the opponent's head and the other underhooking the opponent's arm.

The first attack was a simple choke, where you first grab the topmost gi lapel with the arm that underhooks your opponent's arm. Next, you "feed" the lapel to your other hand and grab tight. This is already quite close to a choke. To make it more effective, you want to force the opponent's head forward while pulling on the gi collar. This can be done by placing the back of your (free) hand behind the guy's head, much like in a rear naked choke.

It is possible that the other guy defends his neck and makes it difficult to get your hand behind his head. This leads to the second attack, which is a variation of the first one. Instead of pushing on his head with your hand, you can do it with the shin of your leg (the leg that is already behind his neck). First, you make a little room for your knee by moving your leg slightly back. Then you raise your knee and maneuver your shin to the back of his head. Now the choke is super tight and you can finish the fight by leaning backwards, tightening the collar, and pushing with your shin.

If, for some reason, the choke fails, you still have another submission to go for. Because you are only using one hand for the choke, the other one can grab the opponent's arm for an arm bar. I think this was the first time we did two different submissions at the same time. So, saturday's lesson: don't get caught in the S mount :).

Because we didn't spend much time with warming up at the beginning of class, we still had about 40 minutes left at this point. Tommi seems to value sparring highly, so we spent the entire time doing doing exactly that, with a total of six rounds.

Our sparring sessions always start on the ground, with both players on their knees. In the middle of a round, I suddenly remembered seeing a sweep/throw from that position, and decided to try it out. All the details were misty to me, and I only remembered the general idea. Well, it turned out to be quite completely wrong, but quite effective. During those six rounds, the throw succeeded (to some extent) about five times, and failed once. Whee!

The sweep itself was something like a hybrid between a judo tomoe nage throw and the balloon sweep from open guard. Here's the video where the sweep is done properly by a blue belt (skip to 3:26 for the sweep):



The whole sparring match is worth a watch, in my opinion. For some reason, I find watching the blue belt guy (called Corey) absolutely inspiring, and have crawled through all his videos several times. With every interesting move, it's watch-rewind-watch-rewind-watch-rewind ad nauseam. This time, the geekiness paid off!