The main instructional part of today's training was another nice takedown move: the ankle pick.
The basic ankle pick comes with your reaching out and grabbing the same side lapel and pulling hard to get the guy to step forward with the foot on that side.
Keeping the grip on the lapel and stiff-arming that side, you go down to your opposite knee and with your opposite hand, reach across and pick the ankle.
As you stand up, using your outside leg as the main driver, bring the ankle with you and push forward with the stiff-arm.
It's an excellent takedown, and really one that I should move to the top of my game. Even if you don't get the ankle pick, your same side grip on the lapel makes it easy to transition to other attacks, including pulling half guard.
That brings me to another point. Rodrigo confirmed tonight something I have been thinking about for the past few days. I need to spend more time in high half-guard and less time fighting with the underhook. I think that's part of what's wearing me out in training so much these days. It's allowing guys to put their weight on me, making me work a lot harder than I should.
Rodrigo's recommendation was to push on the far shoulder with the underhooking arm. That alone might give me enough space to shoot for the underhook. If not, it should give me enough space to slide my knee in and reset the high half.
Which introduces yet another point. I need a sweep or two from high half. Actually, in my page notes, I have a point to work on chokes from the high half, both the basic collar choke and the loop choke if he tries to go low or duck under the grip at the neck.
The high half should also be an entry to the half butterfly and butterfly hook sweeps as well as the underhook sweeps and deep half game.
Another attack from the high half is an exaggerated two handed kimura attack. That will get the guy to open up and expose his hips some as he leans back and postures away from the kimura attack. That should open up an opportunity to attack the outside leg from the inside as well as provide a nice angle to shoot the underhook.
Last on this: guys are starting to move lower on my legs to avoid my basic half guard attacks, the better guys bear hugging and working a pass from there. I did a fairly good job of remembering which direction to push the head. But my hipscaping was poor. I didn't turn into the guy as I pushed the head back into the passing body, escaping my hips backward and using my knee to either moth guard the guy's top arm or wedge my way back into guard.
Wore the competition single jacket tonight and definitely felt more fatigued than I had the previous night. We'll see what comes of it. I did do the math and it will be cheaper to buy an official GB gi than it would be to buy an HCK and try to buy a patch kit off of ebay. I tried to bid on one today and dropped out after the bidding topped $45. When you add in the price of shipping and getting the patches sewn on to an HCK gi by a professional who'll do a good job, it just isn't as cost effective as it used to be.
One scary note: rolling with Rodrigo he tried to post and one point and hurt his thumb badly. I didn't hear it, but apparently half the people in the room heard him palm the mat which is when the injury happened. While I am glad it isn't anything worse (read: neck), I cannot describe how much I hope it's just a bad hyperextension or sprain and not a break.
All for now. 154.6 on the scale (I had predicted 154.3). My half guard is still too sloppy, but I have a gameplan for fixing it - certainly in time for the July revolution if not sooner. I'm actually a little relieved at feeling "permitted" to keep focusing on my half guard instead of trying to develop a full guard right now.
