My ears got swollen a month ago in a practice. First I just tried to be careful not to get any hits to my ears, but it is practically impossible to avoid them completely especially while sparring. So my ears were hurting but I wanted to practice, what to do? I googled a bit and found out that Brute Shockwave guards had gathered quite a following. So I placed an online order and few days later I was back in the game.
I have not seen anyone else use ear guards in our gym, so I was first kind of hesitant to use them. But after several classes they don't seem so strange anymore. They cover ears very well and hardly bother at all. Couple of times they have moved a little bit but generally stay on firmly. As I don't like the aesthetics of cauliflower ears too much I try to continue using these at least if there is even the slightest sense of pain in my ears.
Thumbs up!
(After looking for a suitable link I found out that they've been discontinued. Shame.)
I'll keep it short this time. After a long and exhausting warmup we continued with techniques from turtle position. It's fairly common to turn to turtle after defending a guard pass, as that way the opponent gets no points. But you don't want remain there too long or you will get choked. One way to avoid "hip" choke from the side is to roll the opponent over your back if he is too far over you. I am sure that this clip will show the method much better than I can explain.
We had few different variations for this, but they were somewhat similar.
I was so tired this afternoon that it required more will power than I normally possess to get to this practice. I guess I wasn't the only one as there was only eight persons attending. Spider guard leg/hand position change game was the warm up this time. I did not really get the idea.
We practiced open guard. Basics of passing in open guard is to keep tight control of the legs of the person whose guard you're passing. Good grip is from the inside of the pants. Then you can either lift the legs up or push them down. If you push them down, try to keep them firmly on the ground and pass going with your shoulder going first. Good control is essential, as always.
Defending the classic sweep from butterfly guard was another topic. When you find yourself about to be swiped from butterfly, nicely push the sweeper to the opposite direction with your head pointing the same way. At the same time lift your knee between the opponents legs. From there going the over the leg (knee first) and passing shouldn't be impossible.
Open guard passing for a while and then two simple techniques to get you back to guard from turtle position. The second one looked like this:
The first one was similar, but from a different hand control. The common mistake is forgetting to control the top persons knees so that you don't accidentally give way for the hooks to get in.
There's no better way to kick start a saturday morning than with some shrimping. Tommi guided our tiny crowd (apparently, most people had something better to do than shrimp on a saturday morning) across the gym with forwards and backwards shrimps, ukemis, technical stand-ups, and some strange breakdancey cross step.
The breakdance was quickly brought into context, as we used it to escape from the bottom of the n/s turtle position. With an opponent, the strange move became quite simple. First, bring your ass up by straightening your legs and spread them out to form a good base. Grab the opponent's arm and step under-and-out with the other leg. Straighten your neck to throw your opponent off-balance, and climb to back mount. It's simpler than it sounds.
The main trick for the day was getting the triangle choke from side control or mount. I am unsurprised that Rodrigo Gracie explains the technique better than I can, so check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL0LmvbLqVc for a wonderful and detailed explanation (they don't allow embedding for this clip).
After the triangle felt somewhat ingrained into our minds, we started sparring. Old Man Cauliflower paid me a visit as I got caught in an earlobe-twisting arm triangle, and I got to spend a cool twenty minutes with an ice bag over my tender and swollen ear. Oh yeah, that reminds me: write an angry letter to the company that makes the Jomo brand ice bags. The previous one I used merely went down to a weak lukecold (you know what I mean) temperature, and the one I used on my ear immediately leaked its properly cold contents on my neck and all over the floor.
Bill O'Reilly expresses my opinion on the latest batch of Jomo ice products:
Everybody had a say on what to do for warm up: after the full round and approximately 15 different exercises I felt that I had went to body pump class instead of jiu-jitsu. Then we continued training the mount position, both bottom and attacking.
Tommi showed two different techniques, the ezekiel choke and juji after trying americana. Ezekiel is my old favorite and I've included it in my "game plan" pretty much since I first saw it in a video clip. The idea is to sneakily have your other arm behind the opponent's neck and slip your hand inside the sleeve of your other arm. Then bring the open hand to his throat. It can be utilized pretty much from any position, but from mount and side mount it is probably the likeliest to succeed.
Here Ilya Goldman demonstrates:
Then we briefly went through juji especially after americana. While defending americana one usually uses the other hand to protect the hand the shoulder. From there the hand is free for some serious armbar action.
Mount attacking and defending with different partners for a while and then free rolling I think for three rounds in the end. I felt slightly better with my moves this time.
This was the first class to concentrate fully on the mount. So, after a quick warm up, we picked our partners and started going through some basic stuff about control and escapes.
The mountee has several things that he might try to throw the mounter away from the position. Juha showed us a collection of attempts and counters to them:
If the bottom guy bridges to get your hands on the ground, you can straighten your hips to avoid falling.
Or, you can lay flat on top and put hook his legs. Don't extra-hook with your feet, because the opponent may kick his legs straight and twist your knees to a mush.
If the opponent tries to maneuver his hips in some other way, you can grab behind his neck with both hands and press your elbows to his chest. It's really hard for him to do anything from that position.
If the opponent gets on his side and is about to free his bottom leg by pushing on your knee, quickly grab his pushing wrist and pull it away.
Whatever you do, it's always good to scoot your knees closer to the opponents armpits when returning back from any of the above counters.
To keep things fair for the bottom guy, Juha showed us a new escape combo. You start with the basic bridge escape, where you grab the collar and a sleeve, trap a leg, and bridge to roll the guy away. He can block your sweep by posting his foot on the ground for support. However, this makes his knee rise from the floor, so you immediately move your hand to the knee, and push and free one of your legs.
Armed with a new set of mount tricks, we practiced escaping and keeping mount with our partners before a couple of rounds of free sparring.
Thursday was pretty much the exact copy of a practice from few weeks back. Grabbing the leg after shooting down and then sweeping the opponent nicely was still surprisingly enough in my memory. In side mount, we had the same reversal by rolling the opponent over. Easiest done if he has both his hands in the same side as his body.
This video shows kind of similar looking but totally different technique. Here the main idea is to somersault over the opponent. See for yourself (Not sure if it works well with gi though.):
Quite many rounds of sparring, in the very beginning and also in the end. It seems that the quick development of first few months is now over, not much progress has happened lately. Maybe the development is hidden somewhere in my head. Gotta keep on trying!
After a week's break from training, it was a welcome change to be back on the mat yesterday. Only about ten people showed up, so there was ample room for maneuvering during the class.
Pappa raised our heart rates by making us do some stand-up man-hugging exercises followed by a surprisingly exhausting guard pass queue. My guard defense game has really dwindled down to a predictable collection of a few select moves. Only a couple of months back, I was throwing all kinds of sweep and submission attempts from the bottom guard, with an acceptable success rate. These days, I seem to repeat the same two moves over and over again. Here's a quick outline of the repertoire I like to call "Juuso's Hot Guard Game":
Go for the cross-collar choke.
If it fails, do a half-assed arm bar attempt. It always fails.
Return to step 1.
I have no idea what happened to the helicopter/flower sweeps, the knee pushes, the kimura sweep combinations, and all the rest. Whatever the reason, when I get the guard now, my brain shuts down to tunnel vision mode and it's all boring from there on.
After a quick drink, we trained a new simple counter to a behind-the-neck hip throw. If the uke gets a hold of your neck, but hasn't yet managed to lift you up, your first task is to drop down to a stable low base. Follow up with the familiar backwards takedown, where you extend your leg, hold the uke's body, and sit back for the takedown.
To further train our throw-countering skills, we did another one. This time the uke started with the under-the-arm hip throw. The counter is basically you climbing to his back right from the start. If the opponent is throwing you from the right side, hook your left leg around his hip/leg. From here, you're pretty much covered. If he continues the throw by kneeling down, it will fail miserably, and you can just follow the movement and hook the other leg at your leisure. Free back mount!
As the last techniques for the day, we attacked the turtle position. The first one went something like this:
In the video, the guy grabs the turtle's gi lapel and rolls over. We did a variation where we connected our hands together, one hooking under the arm and the other overhooking the other. Insert knee and roll.
The second attack was a choke. Juha introduced another difference between BJJ and judo. In judo, it's called the hip choke and in BJJ it goes by the name side choke. And whaddayaknow, there's a video for this one too:
Fabio there shows something between a hip and a side choke. The difference, as far as I understood, was in how far you put your body across your opponent. In the video, Fabio has his whole upper body over the turtle's back and his hips can almost touch the opponent. In Juha's "BJJ" version, there's a little more distance, and only your shoulder and the top of your side are on top of the turtle. The reason is quite simple: if you lean too far over the turtle's back, he can grab your arm and roll you over.
We finished the class with two rounds of sparring. I got caught in a nasty headlock that twisted both my earlobes into two ad hoc cartilage calzones. Luckily there's no noticeable swelling, just tender and pink ears. Maybe I'll borrow (steal) Juho's ear guards...
My ears got swollen a month ago in a practice. First I just tried to be careful not to get any hits to my ears, but it is practically impossible to avoid them completely especially while sparring. So my ears were hurting but I wanted to practice, what to do? I googled a bit and found out that Brute Shockwave guards had gathered quite a following. So I placed an online order and few days later I was back in the game. 