It wasn't a full week of training, but I made it to class on Wednesday and Thursday evenings and--more importantly--made it through both classes "without incident" as the kids say. I felt that I was rolling a little bit scared, especially on Thursday when every other fiber of my being was saying "please let me make it through the week unscathed." But that's probably to be expected.
Wednesday night was as Wednesday nights have become of late: mostly specific sparring and then some general sparring. Stephan and Chris (both brown belts) have been "regulars" on Wednesday nights, with an assortment of white and blue belts joining in after we've gotten started.
Thursday night Rodrigo taught a gi class and had us doing a number of drills as part of the warmup. Mostly sit-outs and arm drags--both of which I'm making a part of my jiu jitsu Tabata workout in the mornings. We did butterfly guard lifts (always a killer for me) and a drill to help you keep your balance and move your hips properly when in the mount and the guy tries to lift you up and put a knee up. The sit outs are a good solo drill that helps support that "mount pass" drill.
If there was a lesson from Thursday's class, then getting back to basic movements is it. I realized some of the problems I was having with the arm drag from the Lotus guard (which I'm thinking of renaming for reasons I'll write about later) had to do with some basic movement issues, particularly getting my hips out of the way by using a post. That "posting" comes up a lot, it is also a factor in the crossover sweep, for example.
Rodrigo also showed us an open guard sweep that seemed to give most of us more than a little difficulty in learning.
The sweep is used when the guy stands up in your guard. From the bottom, you want to control the sleeves.
Put one foot in the hip. Hook the other foot behind the knee of the other leg and reach down and cup the ankle of that leg, as well. That's the set-up.
The hard part for me was executing the sweep. You want to push with your legs and pull with your ankle and sleeve grips. As you do this, you want to turn on your side in the direction you want to sweep the guy.
I had a very hard time getting to my side when doing this drill with Jesse. I'm not sure what the specific problem was, though my guess is that I wasn't breaking his posture on the foot-in-hip side. I think the sweep is similar to the cross guard or X-guard sweeps that Rodrigo showed us a few weeks ago insofar as you can do an accordian squeeze, pulling and pushing to get the guy stretched out a little bit and off-balance. That should make it easier to (1) break posture and (2) turn over to the sweep side and finish the sweep.
