My motto for 2009 is ATM: Always Train Mondays.
For one, Monday is a good advanced class. We tend to start off with some light standup for about 7 minutes. Then drill a particular technique for the majority of the class. From there some specific sparring, some regular sparring, and then open mat.
The technique we drilled had to do with ways of countering spider guard. There are a lot of ways to look silly in jiu jitsu, and not knowing what to do when you are up against someone who has a good spider guard is a sure route to one of those ways.
Rodrigo emphasized a couple of things. For example, you want to close the distance. Chuck Liddell has that great line about putting guys "on the end of your punches." Well, you don't want to be on the end of somebody's spider guard. That's where you turn into a marionette if you are not careful.
So either step far back (i.e., the Butler pass) or step deeply forward, in both cases bringing the guy's feet together as much as possible. In the step forward counter, you actually want to sit on the back of the guy's upturned legs and then work to get a knee between his leg and body on one side or the other, depending on how he resists your leg pressure.
The knee motion is similar to the triangle escape "C.C. Grinder", the triangle escape that Mamazinho showed us a while back.
A lot of what Rodrigo talked about had to do with reaction, feeling which way the pressure was coming from and using it to help you get to where you want to be.
You need to watch your base, but as long as you control the distance, you can really put the guy in the spider guard on the defensive. It's worth remembering to stagger your feet when you come in, and drop to the pressure knee as soon as possible to avoid getting swept by the double underhook sweep. But controlling the distance - in tonight's case mostly by crowding - really does eliminate many of the biggest problems with the spider guard.
Another point that's really part of the crowding point. You want to get the guy's hips up off the ground as much as possible. That's why you crowd deeply, so much so that you can go to one knee, which helps your base. Getting his hips off the ground further restricts his ability to pivot from side to side, making him all the more vulnerable to the pass.
Good stuff - and something that we all need to work on. Saulo talks about the spider guard in his book, suggesting that it's the kind of guard that you can really blow up if you approach the pass correctly.
One thing that I really liked about my training tonight, during the specific, the sparring and, to a lesser degree, the open mat, was the fact that I deliberately went to guard and worked spider guard a lot of the time - far more than I usually do.
One of my biggest flaws is that I forget to use the techniques I've been taught in sparring sessions, open or specific. That's the perfect time to see how new things might fit into your game - right after you've been drilling them. If they don't work for you, don't worry: next week you'll be focusing on something else.
So tonight I really focused on pulling open guard, escaping out to the side (left and right, believe it or not), dipping and wedging the knee to open the guard up, then transitioning to full open guard with sleeve control. I wanted to work on the open guard, sure. But I also wanted to give my teammates the opportunity to work on the same techniques and strategies that we'd just spent 30-40 minutes focused on.
I don't mind patting myself on the back a little. It's something that I've really wanted to improve on and tonight I was focused enough to follow-through with it.
We'll see if it was just a one-off tomorrow. But the fact of the matter is that I never played so much open guard before in my life and I loved every minute of it.
One thing I want to add, though. I suspect the fact that I'm starting to click in to my conditioning routine is helping. I felt a little fatigued after the first 10-15 minutes of specific sparring. But after a five minute breather, I was fine for the rest of sparring and the open mat.
