Managed to make it for the early class on Friday. The instruction part had us doing double underhook guard passes where you get the get to back roll. Some of the key details were:
1. Dive with both hands between the legs and up around the thighs. Make sure to keep low, so that your grip is tight.
2. With your rolling hand, reach under and grab the top of the pants. With your attacking arm (usually your right), make sure you grab high up on the collar by the neck. It should almost be a forearm choke/throat pressure.
3. Keep the knee on your rolling hand side up. This will help you get the leverage to roll the guy over.
4. As you get the roll, move to the back by clamping your attacking arm over the waist/hip, sliding your rolling side leg (usually left) wide in a circle backwards, and sliding the other leg, knee-first, into the guy's side to check his hip from the other direction.
We spent a lot of time on this move, enough to help it really sink in. We ended the instructional with a counter to half guard for the guy on the bottom getting his guard passed. The trick with the counter is to circle your inside arm back to block the guy from moving to your back. Extend your inside leg back also and sit on your outside leg. Assuming that he is still moving forward to take your back, he should fall right into your half guard (or guard), with you having a nice deep underhook and pretty good position to attack the outside and inside "corners."
Tatame wasn't bad. I rolled four times straight for a good 20-25 minutes of sparring. I got caught in a guillotine, but didn't panic and managed to get out of it with good technique (protect the neck, reach over the shoulder with the free arm, shoulder of justice plus pike up plus look up, switch your hips and back out toward crossbody ...) and managed to get a bow and arrow choke for the first time in months. I especially like how I fed the collar during the bow and arrow choke, a detail that Rodrigo has been emphasizing.
A nice week. I managed to get in four sessions after all and even though I'm likely to fall short of my planned minimum for March (12 sessions) by one, if you add back in the five classes I missed when I was out sick, then I'd've made my 16 session monthly goal, no problem.
I'm trying to hone in on a few things to focus on this next week. I'm definitely at a place where it makes a lot more sense to emphasize skill development over conditioning - especially given how much conditioning is already built into Rodrigo's classes. I was 153.4 on the scale after Friday's training - an incredible number and one that has me thinking about trying to make featherweight (149) for the Subleague event in early May. Subleague weigh-ins are day of event, so it will have to be a very real, hydrated, fed 149. But I increasingly think that, if I can do it, that's what I should do.
