Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Gracie class, evening 10/28

Another fully-packed class.

Started with guard passing. I enjoyed this focused sparring greatly because I had a partner my size and my experience level, so I got to experiment. A few lessons learned: I'm seeing triangles sometimes, and I'm getting one leg (the one crossing over their neck) up better. The second leg is screwing the pooch, unfortunately-- I tend to swing it pretty wide to get around their arm instead of bending it and bringing my knee to my nose, then unfolding like a praying mantis... so when I get around their arm, they get out of the impending triangle. I feel like when I let them get posture there's no stopping them from breaking my guard. I just don't know what to do yet with an open guard... I can hear some of Tom's lessons rattling around in my brain, and some of Stephan Goyne's, but it hasn't fallen into place yet. I have gotten better at the knee up pass-- Richard emphasized that I need to dive my arm under theirs for the underhook.

The "womens class" tonight was a nonentity.. just me and Amber, so Christy worked us into the guys' class at the beginning. When Donald, the brownbelt, arrived, he taught us a focused class on side mount that involved 5 different positions, counters and recounters, forming a nice flowing drill. Gradually the guys drifted over and joined in. Donald emphasized that a key to maintaining effective side control is keeping their head and body/hips in a straight line; conversely to escape side, you want to continually be changing the relationship between your head and hip until you have created space (then hip out, upa, shrimp etc)

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