Tonight's lesson in the 6-7 class was very Rodrigo, very Gracie Barra. It was a sweep from the Tinguinha style butterfly guard, which looks like a spider guard with your knees. Nowadays, people are starting to treat butterfly guard set-ups as part of the sitting guard. And I have another strong sense of a Marcelo Garcia-style butterfly guard. So I'm going to call this spider guard with the knees "moth guard."
From moth guard you hipscape out and grapevine an arm with a leg. Let's say we hipscape to the left - stiff-legging with the right leg and grapevining his arm with our left leg.
From this position, you want to thrust your leg all the way through. This step caused me problems. But you want to shoot is all the way through. At the same time you scoop the guy's leg on the other side, underhooking it and doing deep. You should be lying almost completely on your back like a big log in front of him. Your other leg should be flat on the mat, blocking the guy's other leg at the knee.
To sweep, extend the grapevine leg and scissor the legs as you would in a flower sweep. Pull on the grip of the grapevined arm. Never let that grip go.
The variation was if the guy put his leg up between your legs to block you. I actually liked the variation better and it gives me something to do whenever the guy puts one knee up.
When this happens, put your free leg up as a hook on his knee up leg. This time when we dive for the scoop, we scoop the knee up leg. An underhook is best because it will put you in the strongest position after the sweep.
Pull on the underhook. Extend the grapvine. Kick out with the hook. It's a Fugitive style sweep, turned up to 11 with all the weapons you are using.
Keep the underhook and you'll be able to keep him from hipscaping away. You want to swing your leg forward (Rodrigo called it "kicking the guy in the face") and tuck it in and under you as you pull up on the underhook, which will probably have him by the heel or ankle. Keep that ankle high up and he won't be able to recover until you are already in side control.
The variation is a nice, nice sweep. And I seemed to get it. I need to start using it exclusively for awhile and seeing how well I can make it work. Watching some videos over at the GB Seattle website the other day, I saw how often Rodrigo worked out of this "moth guard" as I'm calling it. This might be the chance I'd been thinking about to start directly and fairly explicitly "copying" his game.
It's true in most fields of endeavor that many of the greatest found their own style only after trying to emulate the style of someone else who had proven success with that style. It's true in sports, its true in trading, its true in art. It's true, I'm sure, in jiu jitsu, as well.
