BJJ 12.1.2010

Tuesday's class was much lighter than saturday's unforgiving punishment galore. We dived straight into a couple of sparring rounds with 50% power, and finishing submissions was off limits.

Everybody paired up while I was still taping my mangled fingers, so I ended up rolling with Juha for the first round. I managed to slip him into my guard, but it took only a few seconds for him to pass into side mount. The rest of the round saw me practicing my underdog skills from side mount, mount, S-mount, and knee mount. While I stood no chance of gaining control, I did block quite a few chokes and locks because I noticed Juha's more-or-less sneaky set-ups early enough.

A brief session of guard passing followed before went for the day's technical part. The underlying theme for all the moves was spider guard, and most of the stuff was already (remotely) familiar: how to pull spider guard from a standing up position, how to position the legs, etc. There were also two sweeps, including a fun new one. Hold on while I try to find a youtube example...

...and here we go:


The point is simple. If the opponent tries to pass your spider from the wrong side (you should pass on the side of your trapped biceps), you keep your foot on his biceps, and grab his knee by the pants. Once he has "passed", lift the knee and roll him over. The sweep itself requires surprisingly little effort, because the top guy has no real balance. It's one of those "wheeee!" moments of smooth zero-gravity orbiting.

We also trained taking the triangle and doing the basic spider guard sweep (much like the scissor sweep, but with the sweeping leg still on the biceps).

The class finished with two rounds of free sparring. In the first round, I landed my first ankle lock from open guard. Yay! I also pulled off my recently-learned favourite move, the brute force cross collar choke. It's ugly and it's trivially simple, but after getting caught in it time after time with Tommi, I've learned to appreciate its cleansing purity.