Was out sick on Monday and decided against training on Tuesday night. So my first class of the week was Stefan’s Wednesday night class.
We worked on the omoplata from the closed guard, one of Stefan’s signature moves. I’m trying to adopt and include the omoplata in my game because it seems to be one of the few hip movements in jiu jitsu that come relatively naturally—unlike the “swing” move in armlocks from the guard which is still something I struggle with.
A nice detail Stefan added was a move he showed us many, many months ago in a Saturday training. You enter the omoplata. But rather than just pinning down the guy by the waist, your reach over and grab his far leg near the knee or calf and roll him over in the direction of your knees.
It’s the same sort of roll someone might try to do to escape an omoplata. But as the one precipitating the move, you have time to get to the next step, which is to turn AWAY from the roll so that you are sitting on the guy’s chest with his arm trapped.
Be careful here, because there is a very tight shoulder lock right around the corner. Keeping everything tight, you want to slide off to the side so that you are sitting on the mat with the arm and shoulder still trapped. Squeeze the knees and lean back gradually to get the submission from the shoulder lock.
Thursday night was an interesting class. The first 90 minutes or so is all for beginners (though advanced students can participate, of course), which is followed by 30 minutes of pretty constant rolling just for advanced students. We finished the first 90 minute session with some specific work from the closed guard, and a lot of guys who didn’t roll in the first 90 minutes showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the second 30-minute session. That’s how it goes. But I always find it “interesting” to roll with guys who are fresh after I’ve been working for a good hour.
Rodrigo seemed a bit perplexed at the difficulty a number of us were having with the armlock from the closed guard he was showing us. Maybe more than a bit perplexed. I was no master of the move myself, which I think requires more hip dexterity than Rodrigo realized. And all the more so in a class made up largely of new and very new white belts.
Here’s the armlock. What you want to do in this move is to trap the shoulder of the arm you are going to lock. Once you do this, you have the option of attacking with an Americana type of armlock and then, if the guy moves to relieve the pressure, finishing him off with a more traditional armlock.
So, using an attack on the guy’s right arm as the example, Rodrigo had us plant our left foot on the mat, and scoot your hips just a little bit to the side. This, I should point out, was one of many points of difficulty insofar as too many of us were making the mistake of taking a big huge HIPSCAPE and sending our hips flying away from the guy. All you want to do is open things up enough so that you’ve got an angle on the guy’s shoulder with the leg on that side.
Once you’ve got your lock side leg up over the shoulder, you want to “swing” with your other leg up under the armpit, breaking his posture toward the lock side. This was problematic for me because I’ve been working so much on using the “swing” to set up the armlock from the closed guard in the first place that hitting the “swing” AFTER I’ve already got my other leg up on the shoulder seemed awkward.
If my lock side leg is up on the guy’s shoulder, then how do I get the leverage to swing my other leg up? Usually, with an armlock from the guard, you plant the lock side foot on the hip and push off against that hip to help “swing” your off leg up and over. One time when Rodrigo showed the move, he attacked with both legs at the same time—which in some ways only confused the issue for me. Doing both legs at the same time requires that hip dexterity I was talking about, it seems to me.
Maybe I’ve got the moves backward and Rodrigo did do the swing first. It would certainly be a lot easier to get your lock side leg up on the shoulder if you had already broken the posture with the swing ...
So I’ve got to work on it. There is no position where my guard game is more exposed than when I’m working from the closed guard. As the specific and advanced sparring revealed, I am still awful at breaking posture and terrible about moving my hips. One glimmer of hope came when I was rolling with George (good to see George in the gi, by the way). We were doing a closed guard specific and although George passed my guard about 20 times, I did switch up to a spider guard at one point which helped me ward him off longer than with my basic closed guard approach.
I’ll talk about that more later. I’m going to spend some time this weekend with Saulo’s instructional on the guard, as well as Peligro’s ,The Essential Guard. One thing I’m starting to be convinced of, though, is that I need to treat my guard game the way I’ve decided to treat my passing the guard game: very regimented, very simple and very consistent.
So in the same way that I’m trying to adopt a "Stand or Be Damned" approach to passing the guard, I think it’s time to adopt an "Open or Nothing" attitude when it comes to the guard. By that I mean opening my guard and switching to Tommy Gun, the vine guard, Hilo guard, or, if their base is rock solid, butterfly and Cobra guard.
I’m thinking that opening my guard and moving my legs more might actually help "trick" me into better and more natural hip movement. We’ll see.
Gracie Barra Seattle group photo the Saturday after next, the 22nd at the Tully’s location. Same day as "GATZ". I’ll have to break out my new Gracie Barra gi for the picture. Thankfully the new shiny red patches didn’t bleed when I washed the gi for the first time this week.
