Friday's instructional was all about escapes: escapes from side control and rear mount.
The side control escape was based on two things, one that was new and another that was a reminder. The new aspect was swinging your hips to the outside, away from the top guy's body, so that as you bumped (upa'd) you were doing it at a diagonal or 45 degree angle to his control over your upper body.
One easy way to set it up is to lift your legs up together, bent at the knees, and first swing them into the guy, using that momentum to swing your legs away from him, plant hard down on the mat, and bump into him, bridging with your upper body.
The second part was the role of either walking away or doing that dropstep move that Rodrigo used to emphasize a lot as a drill. It's the basic back2knees move, but you want to be as perpendicular to the guy's body as possible when you do this switch to make it that much easier to escape and take control. So if you have to take a step or two to get over there before doing the dropstep to knees, take them.
The other escape was from rear mount. Here, we're countering a bow and arrow type choke set-up. You want to defend the neck, of course and get rid of the top hook on your thigh.
But the escape comes by taking a big step out of the hook with the freed leg, and reaching with your free hand (the top hand not involved in choke defense) and grabbing his lapel, or gi at the shoulder or arm. Then you want to turn into him, pulling on your overhead grip as you rotate your body forward using both your head and your shoulder to drive the guy flat to his back. Ultimately you want your head to move from below his head in the choke defense to above his head and cross his body in the counter.
I've seen Rodrigo do this escape a few times and was always focused for some reason on the big step he took out of the hook escape part of the escape. Now I realize why it always looked like he was running inside a big wheel, turning in a circle from the beginning of escape all the way through to gaining top position in side control.
One drill that will help this is the alternating hipstep drill, the one where you can turn it into spinning around into sitting guard. It's a good hamstring move that would probably be a nice compliment to backstep drills: the hipstep extending forward and the backstep extending backward.
Pretty good tatame. I'm struggling with half guard passes lately, and will look to tighten that up next week as a focus. What I'm going to just call the Low Pass is working fairly well, especially with the adjustments from the Justin Garcia mini-instructional. I want to continue bringing it up to speed, but not at the expense of the Saulo and the 101, as well as the Leite passes Rodrigo showed us a little while back.
I did feel as if i redeemed myself a little from my woeful King of the Guard performance on Wednesday. I actually got the moth guard sweep to work, which is a sweep that I think I really need to rely on as part of my post-half guard game. It flows very well out of a strong half guard pass attempt, especially if you have to bow out and bring in the knee to stop a knee cross type pass.
A little heavy on the scale for the end of the week at 158.8. Probably has a lot to do with not training on Thursday. Still, as long as I'm under 160 consistently, getting down to 155 won't be a problem.
It's funny. I used to think that three days on the mat was a pretty full training schedule and that two was a reasonable minimum every now and then. Now, four days a week is starting to feel like the new normal.
*Note: I knew there was an escape that I was forgetting. The third escape that Rodrigo showed us was replacing half guard from the turtle position.
The key to this escape was to grab the leg near the knee of the side you are going to turn to. Ideally, you should design the escape so that you end up on your best half guard side, which for me is my right hip. So from turtle, I would reach down with my right hand and grab the pants at the knee.
The trick with this move is that you stiff-arm the knee instead of pulling it toward you, which will be your first instinct. You just want to keep the relationship between that leg and your body the same (maybe a little greater, but certainly no closer), so that you can spin around to the outside, putting him in a sort of sitting half guard.
As you turn, you want to bring your elbow down tight against your body. Depending on how tightly he might be holding you around your waist, you might actually be able to get a shoulder lock as you clamp down with your elbow tight against your body and turn (outer, stiff arm side, shoulder to the inside).
It's a great guard replacement move and anything that puts me back in half guard is something I'm going to appreciate.
