Training Day: Friday

Arrived in time to catch the last half of the regular class and all of the specific and Live Training. The focus was on setting up the cross choke - Roger Gracie-style - from mount. Prof Carlos emphasized a couple of things in particular: dropping the forearm against the chest to prevent the swim-under defense, putting your forehead on the mat fully to the opposite side to put all of your weight on the guy's upper body ... It was a good refresher and reminded me very much of Sauleh's choke attack from mount last weekend.

King of the Hill mount specific had a twist: you had to recover full guard from the bottom. No stopping at half guard and no reversing. You had to recover to a stable full guard: closed, open, spider, butterfly, inverted, whatever.

It's the kind of thing that training is all about, forcing yourself into peculiar situation that require an adaptive response. More than once I was able to get to the sweep, only to have to start all over again and try and get to a stable guard position, specifically. No doubt this kind of thing expands your fundamental jiu-jitsu awareness - as well as your guard recovery.

Given the days off, I was very happy with that session. I had more than a few sizable training partners during the specific drill and it was great to really feel myself being tested to stay patient, stay technical and not waste energy against significantly stronger aspirants to "the Hill."

A lot of conditioning. I still owe Prof 40 pushups from the final round of the intervals when I had to go iso. But I'm feeling pretty good about the specific muscle endurance, courtesy of the HICT/box step workout. I've started adding some cardiac power workouts and will be doing more of that over the next couple of weeks. But what is most important is (1) overall aerobic base and (2) specific muscle endurance. And the HICT/box steps have been working well on both scores.

Good training with Hakim afterwards. I don't think I've trained with him in more than a year. Very good half guard, very smooth game overall. And given some good anticipations on his part, it also turned out to be a good opportunity to work my triangle defense. More survival than escape - or, even better, the Gordo - but it was nice to see that the basic approach of feeding the shoulder and working for the exact opposite angle that the person doing the triangle wants is at least keeping hope alive.

156.6 post train. Heading into three weeks out, everything is on target on that score.

Training Day: Thursday

Circumstances allowed me to give a Thursday night training a shot and it was very much worth it. I got to the academy early enough to do a little matwork (TM) before hooking up with Angus for some technique review. This is something I've really got to make a habit of - some of the most important breakthroughs have come from working with blue belts like Angus and Mark and Joe before or after class, reviewing specific problem areas and potential solutions.

Tonight we worked on the far side ankle pick from the collar drag. My preference has always been for the near side pick, the cross pick, using the drag to get the guy to put his weight on the foot you are seeking to attack. But the far side pick has it's advocates and both Prof Carlos and Prof Lindsey have both made the case for the far side pick.

Prof Carlos added a subtle guard pass at the end of the takedown, which then morphed into a guard pass with collar choke. Very good chain working - going all the way from takedown to finish - which is a really good way to think about jiu-jitsu.

Good hard training. We did a takedown King of the Hill that really put me through my paces. Having not worked on Live takedowns in several weeks, I was more tentative than I would have liked to have been, not really aggressively working Rip Cord, my ankle pick set-up and takedown, as I should have. One nice discovery/recollection was that the safe clinch is one of my favorite positions for a takedown. Obviously, not everybody is going to let you close the distance that much. But I love the push/pull of the safe clinch, and almost never have failed to get the takedown if I am fortunate enough to get the clinch.

Live training with Prof Casey, which is always a great study - and right now more than ever in many ways. I also got a chance to roll with Joe, who thankfully encouraged me off the sidelines when I was thinking about calling it an evening. A great roll with Joe, though maybe shorter than I would have liked due to recurrent leg cramps and overall fatigue on my part (the latter largely induced after fighting off a very tough triangle attack).

That said, I was still surprised to weigh in at 153.6 on the scale. That's among my lightest, post-train weights ever. Wednesday was a essentially a fast day (largely unintended) and today was a pretty low carb/low calorie day (one midday meal of steak and broiled greens and a piece of toast). Combine that with 24 minutes of HICT (high intensity continuous training) this morning and maybe it's not so surprising to see numbers so low.

At least it gives me license to eat! I just need to keep it relatively clean.

Training Day: Saturday

Today was a special training Open Mat for some old friends and training partners of Prof Rodrigo's, guys who were part of helping get jiu-jitsu started here in Seattle 6-7 years ago. A lot of folks training - and there was a special added bonus of Budo Videos replaying the ADCC 2011 Day One competition in the background.

I got in four sessions - a good tough roll with a blue belt from Bellevue named Jim, an even tougher roll with Benny who was down from up north, an incredible roll with Sauleh (with whom I never can train enough) and finishing up roll with blue belt Steve, who arrived on the late side. I also got to spend a LOT of time talking and drilling with Glenn, mostly over half guard, but also looking into other basic concepts like space and the range-game when it comes to guard work.

A lot of good things. I need to brush up on my triangle defense on the one hand - including my escape. But my watchdog half guard pass is working very, very well and I just need to keep at it. Still not getting enough movement on top, but it's a preoccupation just about every time I roll so focusing on it should be a first step toward fixing it.


155.9 on the scale post-train. This is a good place to be at the end of the week. For all my talk of featherweighting, I'm increasingly thinking that this lightweight level is where I belong.

Another Triangle Choke Escape

Courtesy of GracieMag and Gracie Barra Parana:

8 Weeks Out: Conditioning/Training Schedule

Sunday:
Aerobic Capacity - Ground

Monday:
BJJ

Tuesday:
Tempo Training
BJJ/Competition Training

Wednesday:
OFF

Thursday:
Threshold Training
BJJ

Friday:
BJJ/Competition Training
(No Gi)

Saturday:
Aerobic Capacity - Standing

*

Here's the schedule for the next month or so. The focus in on general endurance, splitting aerobic capacity into a two-day "ground" and "standing/LSD3" component. The idea is to build up my cardio to allow me to train longer and more intensely over the next eight weeks. If there was one thing I took away from my match with Sauleh on Saturday, it was about upping the intensity. Rodrigo has been exhorting us in that direction for the past few weeks. It's time to make that a training priority and off-mat aerobic capacity work should help.

Later on, I'll switch up to a more explosive, power-endurance based workout. But to get things started, this is the right focus.

I did the aerobic capacity - ground workout today, essentially 30 minutes of matwork, the 360 drill, my 1/2 guard leg drill and armlocks with The Chair Guard at a moderate pace. My right inner thigh has been very sore all day, which is probably a good thing. I'm icing it like crazy. Other than that, though, I worked up an excellent sweat and my HR was around the high 130s low 140s, at least, which is good. I'm going to have to lower The Chair Guard at some point, and add some weight in order to make it work (right now, I'm afraid to do the full 90 degree rotation for the armbar for fear of toppling the thing). But I think the components are there. I've long wanted an aerobic workout that was purely jiu jitsu oriented and now I think I've got it - or at least the know-how to put one together.

Skills focus for Week One is transitioning to slingshot guard. I'm looking to poach a training partner to work on both the slingshot armdrag and slingshot sweep (the Renzo). The position escape I want to drill is rear mount and the submission escape is, you guessed it, the triangle. The pass is the 1/2 guard knee wedge to backstep.

Gracie Barra Seattle Intramurals 2

Entirely too many thoughts going through my head tonight after the Gracie Barra Seattle Intramurals 2 event this morning. But for now I'm going to celebrate my first submission win in competition with this post from last October which would have been nice for me to remember during my first match - before my little historic achievement.

About that Triangle

About that Triangle

If I were a mouse, then I might be looking at a picture of a cat. If I were Joe Frazier, then I might be looking at a picture of George Foreman. If I were Superman, then I might be looking at a picture of kryptonite.

As it is, I am who I am … which means I’m looking at a picture of a triangle choke.
I have been relatively successful at defending a number of attacks—mata leao, armlocks, collar chokes—from a number of different opponents, many of whom have significantly better skills than me. At the same time, I have had an amazing ability to fall prey to triangle choke attacks from opponents who, by most measures, are often not as skilled as I am.

Why? As Casey warned me months and months ago, my posture in the guard is terrible. I suspect it is because, in my head, I am “on top” and part of being “on top” is being “over” your opponent. This means I have a tendency to lean over the guy when I am in his guard. While there are some physical attributes (read: tight quads) that are contributing to the problem, it really amounts to little more than a very, very bad and costly habit. As I’ve told people, I’ve lost four fights in competition and all of them are attributably directly to my poor posture in the guard

So there’s that. And there is no more severe penalty for poor in-guard posture than getting submitted by triangle choke. While I need to get better at not getting in the bad posture position in the first place, I might as well remind myself of how to attack the triangle choke.

• 1. Turn your head to face the choking leg or your free arm. This will take much of the pressure off the choke because now your artery is between his pelvis and his calf rather than between your own bicep and his thigh.
  
  
• 2. Whichever escape/counter you’re going to use, posture up and step up with the leg that is on the same side as the trapped arm. For me, this almost always means stepping up with my right leg since it is usually my right arm that gets trapped. Whatever you do, DO NOT step up with the opposite leg. This will allow the guy to underhook that leg and swing his body around to get perpendicular to your body and get an excruciatingly good angle on your neck.
  
  UPDATE: The step up leg is determined by the kind of escape. If you are using C.C. Grinder, then all of the above is true: step up with the leg that is on the same side as the trapped arm. However, if you are using the Midget Slam escape, then you must step up with the opposite leg.
  
  You have to do this because you need the leverage of that opposite leg in order to help posture up out of the Midget Slam. You can't do this if you step up with the trapped side leg. You don't have to worry about your opposite leg being underhooked because when you dive down into the Midget Slam, you actually block the guy from being able to reach under and underhook that opposite leg.
  
  
• 3. Use your free hand to control his hip and keep it in place. You want to work your hips toward the trapped arm side. Whatever else you do with your arms (Midget Slam or CC Grinder), circling your body around toward the trapped arm side will make it easier to put pressure on his legs. Circling in the other direction will get you choked out.
  
  
• 4. Move! Move! Move! Almost nobody hits a triangle choke perfectly on first effort. The sooner you begin attacking it, the more likely they are to get a poor triangle that is more easily defeated. The longer you wait, the more they can arrange their legs to get the lock in properly. As soon as you feel the triangle coming, posture up. If your posture is already broken, then turn your head on your side (facing away from the trapped arm), and move into either the Midget Slam (opposite leg step up) or the C.C. Grinder escape (trap side leg step up).

CC Grinder: Why Follow the Arm

When escpaing the triangle choke, it is natural--and sometimes effective--to move away from the trapped arm. I've seen no gi fighters get out of triangles this way.

Clearly, the lack of friction is a plus for this escape--which explains why it is more effective in bare-chested no gi and MMA competition than in gi or real-world situations. If there is one mistake I have seen in triangle chokes over and over again, then that mistake has been when the attacker has gotten "too much shoulder" into the choke."

I was watching an IFL mixed martial arts fight with Fabio Leopoldo and another guy, a tough, wrestler-type with good slams. Leopoldo won the fight, though it was closer than it needed to be because while Leopoldo achieved excellent submission positions--especially involving the triangle--he failed to finish any of them.

In particular, Leopoldo missed with numerous triangle chokes. His mistake was attacking straight on, and not getting an angle--something I think of as being able to look down the line of your choking knee. His opponent was powerfully built in the shoulders and was never in any danger because too much of his shoulder was involved in the choke. This prevented the necessary arm-to-neck pressure that makes the triangle a finishing move.

Attempting to escape the triangle choke by "pulling the arm out" actually gives the attacker a chance at getting an even better position because in pulling your arm out, you are taking your shoulder out of the equation and making it easier for a proper triangle choke to be set.

It seems counter-intuitive ("If I give him more arm, then he'll just transition to an armbar!"), but I think this is why the CC Grinder triangle choke escape is effective. As long as you remember to keep the hips in check, you can create a lot of pressure on the attacker's legs as you circle around in the direction of the arm, keeping the guy's hips low enough to ward off a realistic armbar attack, smashing the triangle.

First Responders

Rolling with Tommy again last Tuesday was a reminder of my susceptibility to the triangle choke. I even got caught in one Wednesday night against Peter. In both instances, I thrashed around a lot. But because I didn't really have a plan, I ended up tapping both times.

Defense in jiu jitsu, it seems to me, is fundamentally about first response. If you make the right first decision to stack against an armbar from the guard, to posture against a triangle choke, then I'd bet you're halfway home to escaping and more than halfway home to at least not being submitted "right now." I like to think of the necessary series of moves to escape a bad position. But what seems increasingly important is to make the right first move--if only to give yourself a few seconds to process a more complete escape.

Against the triangle choke, this means pulling from the basic rules ("posturing") and the basic escapes (Mamazinho's "C.C. Grinder" and Pereira's "Midget Slam") the key "first response" that makes them work. Right now, that first response, seems to be to come up on the knee ("Knee Up") on the same side as the trapped arm in the triangle choke.

I've written before about watching OTM's 101 Submission Series and noticing that nobody who was shown tapping to a triangle choke so much as tried to come up on the trapped side knee. It was amazing to notice that. Plenty tried to come up on the other knee but that never worked. The problems with going Knee Up on the choke side are enormous. For one, the guy on the bottom can underhook that Knee Up to get an even better angle for the choke. It's really the self-defeating equivalent of trying to stand out of an armbar from the guard.

Even if the guy on the bottom doesn't take advantage of a Knee Up on the choke side, the second problem is that the physics of the defense are wrong in terms of leaving you vulnerable to both a sweep and further choking. With regard to the sweep, I'm reminded of the point Cesar Gracie makes in the "passing the guard" portion of his instructional DVD. You want to make sure that your base is covered. With one arm trapped in a triangle choke, you are vulnerable to being swept in the direction of that trapped arm. Going Knee Up on the choke side doesn't nothing to change that. Even worse, it exposes that leg to an underhook that can lead very easily to a sweep or further choking (see previous paragraph).

With regard to "further choking", the problem is that a Knee Up on the choke side actually makes the choke worse. Instead of the choke simply being between pressure on your arm against your neck on one side, and the guy's leg against your neck on the other--which obviously is bad enough--the choke is amplified by the squeezing effect the Knee Up on the choking side has on your upper body. And the more you push off with the Knee Up on that side, the more you push yourself into the choke that your arm is complicit in on the other side.

In contrast, going Knee Up on the trapped side actually helps relieve the pressure of your arm against your neck by helping push your shoulder forward (which moves your upper arm forward). When you consider how we're always told when doing the triangle choke to get as little "shoulder" into the choke as possible, you can see why going Knee Up on the trapped side helps.

Going Knee Up on the trapped side also provides you with the strongest possible base from which to regain posture. I've had well-meaning teammates shout "posture!" to me from the sidelines on more than one occasion. But what I've needed was to understand the actual mechanics of regaining posture, the action, not just the goal. Against the triangle choke, getting the Knee Up on the trapped side is the action--or at least the first one.

With the Knee Up on the trapped side, it is easy to see how you can shift into either the C.C. Grinder or Midget Slam escapes. With the C.C. Grinder, that Knee Up on the trapped side will be the knee that you drive into the bottom guy's chest as you grind counter-clockwise, the trapped hand bringing the gi collar across the throat like a slow-motion hook to the jaw. With the Midget Slam, that Knee Up on the trapped side gives you the leverage so that after you've got your hands on the knee of the choking leg, you can twist down and hard, pinning that leg on the mat.

De-Triangularation

I'm starting to give up on defeating the triangles. Admittedly, I've been caught by guys like Clint and Tommy who've got good triangle choke attacks, fast and accurate. But I'm starting to lose the will to fight them properly. So a post on the subject is in order.

I wrote about Mamazinho's triangle escape. There's a nice escape that I'd started to use, the one from Gracie Barra San Diego. But it really wasn't working for me. Tommy, for one, quickly figured out that if you do the escape incorrectly (or incompletely, as was probably my case), you can get your back taken. That escape also keeps me in the self-imposed trap of wanting to pass the guard on the ground, which is something else I really need to get over.

So Mamazinho's escape is nice additionally because it is a standing escape. And it may be an eternal irony that though jiu jitsu is "ground" fighting, a lot of what is holding me back is a stubborn refusal to stand up.

There are some key details in Mamazinho's triangle escape: forcing the hip down with the free hand, and throwing the "cross" with the collar on the side you pass toward with the goal of smashing your way out ... But one of the things I think is haunting me is the spectre of getting armlocked as the bottom guy transitions out of the triangle.

The armbar comes from the leg on the side you are passing/smashing. The guy on the bottom is going to try and put that leg on the other side of your head with the choking leg.

So if I'm paranoid about that armlock transition, that's the most likely direction. Forewarned is forearmed. Besides, the counter to the armbar is stacking, so as long as I am smashing as I pass and not remaining high, I'll be in the best position to defend the armbar if the bottom guy does manage to attack with it.

Errata 2.0

Rolling with Clint tonight, I got caught in a triangle choke. It certainly wasn't the first time--not by a long shot. But I forgot a key element (or two) when I was trying to escape.

I went for Mamazinho's standing escape. My big mistake was in grabbing the wrong collar. I grabbed the far collar and then tried to somehow pull it back towards me across Clint's neck. What I want to do instead is to grab the near collar, the collar closest to the side I'm trying to "pass" or escape on and thrust it across the throat. I think I described it as throwing a left or right cross over the chin.

Another mistake--of somewhat lesser importance, but ...--was in not controlling the hips. What I should have done with my free hand (in tonight's case, my left hand) was to pull down on the pants and try to push his hips back to the mat. If I'm doing everything else correctly, then that move will only make things easier.

Also rolled with Tommy. He's still getting his wind back from his time away, but rolling with him is still like climbing into an industrial strength washing machine. He was working some upside down guard tonight and I wanted to try that move BJ Penn does where you stack the guy and take his back. But I couldn't figure out the angle.

Anyway, Tommy caught me some hundred times in about seven or eight minutes. But one key mistake I made that he pointed out had to do with taking the back of a guy in the turtle. I had been doing the reach under to try and control the wrist. But I got sloppy when I couldn't control it. Leaving my hand and arm floating around under there left me open to one of Tommy's wristlocks, which he slapped on me with typical speed. What he pointed out to me afterward is that I should grab the jacket lapel on the far side if I can't get the wrist and pull it in tight. If your hand is against his body, he said, then there isn't the same amount of space that will leave you vulnerable to a wrist lock or other attack.

I'm not doing so well with my half-guard game. It is sort of stalling out. I'm doing a better job of getting small, but I need to get out of there: either with a sweep or a take-the-back. There are a couple of things that are holding me back: a laziness factor, a muscle fatigue factor and a doubt factor ... all of which I need to work on or I'm going to miss opportunities to improve my game at the pace I'd like.