Stephan taught class on last Wednesday while Mamazinho worked with a small crop of white belts. Mostly we worked on techniques from knee-on-stomach (“Hank Hill”): an escape for the defense and a pair of chokes. I would have preferred two escapes, because I’m always getting caught in knee-on-stomach and would like as many escapes as possible. But the escape Stephan showed us is certainly a worthy one. Additionally, I tried my “running man” escape during the specific drills and Stephan pointed out a mistake that I was making that was allowing guys to take my back. So, in a way, I got two escape techniques out of class, after all.
The first escape involves a couple of basic principles. It is an elbow escape, at root. But what is important is hand positioning. For one, you never want to put a hand on the knee that is pressing into your stomach, no matter how tempting it may be. Doing otherwise will make you very vulnerable to an armlock.
Instead, you want to put one hand in the center of the stomach, grabbing the belt if possible. The other hand you want on the knee of the OTHER leg. This is a far more effective way to attack the base of a guy in knee-on-stomach than trying to push against his knee. The knee has a much lower center of gravity and has all of the guy’s weight behind it (or most of it). By pushing on the belt and the other knee, you challenge the guy’s balance much more AND, by pushing his body backward are taking some of the pressure of the knee-on-stomach off of your solar plexus.
As you begin to move him backwards a bit, you want to come up on the inside knee (sort of an elbow escape to the knee) and, while still pushing against the belt, grab the ankle of the leg you were pushing. Come up to standing, still pushing against the belt and pulling upward on the ankle.
The chokes were the same ones that Mamazinho instructed us in a few months back, chokes I’ve called “Hank Hill choke” for the basic collar choke and “Babe Ruth” for the baseball variation. Stephan had some interesting ideas about the baseball choke (actually for both chokes) that I’ll just list as rules to remember.
1. Keep your wrists straight. Remember that you want to choke with the blade of your wrist or lower forearm. Curving your wrist takes a lot of the bit out of your choke and it can be difficult to get the wrist straight once you’ve got the choke on and are applying pressure. Take your time, thread your hands into position and get a good, proper, deep grip.
2. Stephan used a sort of knee down/leg out stance when he was applying the baseball choke (“Babe Ruth”). The inside knee would be down while the outside leg would be out, making it easier to pass around toward north-south.
3. From the north-south position in Babe Ruth, Stephan got low and went chest-to-chest to increase the pressure. He kept his head to the side, looking in the direction he’d just moved from to help stay as low as possible.
4. Another, somewhat small detail. When going for the choke, don’t hesitate to grab some material as well as the collar. All you are trying to do is anchor your arms in such a position that when you bring your elbows in, the twisting action of your forearms will close a loop that will end up in a choke. So get deep, grab as much material as you can handle, keep those wrists straight and bring those elbows in tight.
