Wednesday night with Stefan … we worked two moves from side control: the farside arm lock and the kimura in the event the guy is able to bend his arm out of the armlock. After that, we did a little specific sparring from side control—starting with the arm and without—before ending the class for general sparring. I rolled three times, I think: Brandon the Judo Guy, Andrew and Stefan.
A few key details with the far side arm lock, which has been a very difficult submission for me to finish with. Starting with the north hand on the collar and the south hand on the far side of the guy’s body checking the hip, the first thing to do is to trap the guy’s arm (assuming he makes the mistake of putting his arm on the north side of your head. If he put it on the south side of your head, then you would look to switch to Watch Dog and attack with bent arm locks).
Trap the arm by reaching around the arm with your north hand and grabbing your own lapel. Take your south hand and put it on the near side right by his hip. This is the block. In order for the block to work effectively, you have to put your weight on it. It might be better to think of it as a post.
That block or post will also help you lift yourself up and walk around to north-south. The farside arm lock is really set up from north-south. By the time you get to the far side, the arm lock should be pretty much ready to go.
Here are some very important details that Stefan emphasized. As you are coming around from north-south, put your “lock-side” knee right into the guy’s ribs as you roll him away from you. This will help keep him from rolling into you to escape the arm lock, as well as help set your legs up for a tighter lock. Another detail was to make sure your “trailing foot” was right by the guy’s head. You should almost be sitting right on his head (a point I’ll come back to in a later post) before you spin into the arm lock.
The kimura variation happens if the guy is able to slip his arm out a bit and bend it to avoid the armlock. In this instance, you want to reach down and grab the wrist and go for the kimura. Some details here include sprawling out your south leg and hooking your north leg around the guy’s head as you increase pressure on the lock. This will further immobilize the guy and make it harder for him to resist the submission.
Another detail was specifically for instances when the guy defended the kimura by grabbing his gi, or belt or whatever. What you want to do—and this would have helped GSP when he was trying to work that kimura on Koscheck—is to pull the arm in the direction their wrist is bent. That is the path of least resistance, for lack of a better phrase. Stephen Kesting has a slightly more elaborate procedure. But I like Stefan’s approach, which is both simple and commonsensical (read: easy to remember). So that’s the one I’m going with.
