1. The Scarf Hold Blues
Last night I spent another inordinate set of minutes struggling under Andrew’s all-too-effective (at least against me) scarf hold. Andrew’s positioning reminds me of exactly what Saulo talks about in controlling from the cross body. He is completely locked on my hips and, as such, doesn’t need to use his arms or his legs (much) in order to maintain position.
I’ve been struggling against this before. In fact, I was having a harder time that I wanted against Brandon’s scarf hold during our roll. Brandon may be no brown belt, but he’s a real-live judoka and that scarf hold is something near the beginning of the newaza playbook.
There are a couple of approaches, such as throwing the leg up and over the guy’s head and pulling him backward with it, that I could try. But the main thing I need to do is to bridge up and into the guy in order to get his hips (really, both our hips) off the mat. That will give me room to either reverse sitout with my near leg, or to get the underhook with my outside arm and work for the belly lock and roll.
Don’t waste energy struggling. Get yourself ready and do the escape properly. Bridge up and into him. Then pummel for the underhook or do the reverse sit-out to knees.
2. Hip Movement and H. Rap
I tried the arm wrap attack on Brandon last night. I was eager to try out the Jersey Shore stuff from closed guard, and when the opportunity came for me to take closed guard and go for the arm wrap, I went for it.
Unfortunately, Brandon simply leaned back and pulled his arm out.
What I need to do when attacking with the armwrap is to turn into the guy and move the guy’s shoulder downward toward the mat. The only way to do this is to hipscape out and turn into the guy as I’m wrapping the arm. That torques the arm at an angle and makes it much, much harder for the guy to be able to just straight pull his arm out.
3. "They pass with their hands."
I’m pretty sure that’s a quote from Marcelo Garcia talking about defending guard passes—especially against his “butt scoot” sitting guard, a guard I have adopted for training. One thing that has been unnecessarily frustrating has been the way I’ve let guys get grips and stand to pass my sitting guard. It’s been just terrible. Mostly I’m left to vainly try and stretch my not-particularly-lengthy legs out and trap them in half guard. Most of the time, this does not work—in part, because by stretching out my legs, I’ve given up an ability to be mobile and the guy can continue running around.
The solution? There are three really. One is to go for a single leg takedown. Another is to go for a front headlock and possibly a guillotine if I get my arm in deep enough. Last, you guessed it, ARM DRAG!.
