Rodrigo led the class instead of Lindsey on Monday. He introduced a new takedown based off the lapel grip that I really like as a play off the Jacare/ankle pick takedown.
The takedown is a sort of ouchi gari, inside-to-outside, foot sweep. From the lapel grip, you reach behind him with your free hand and get a grip on his belt. If you were closer, you'd be able to attack with a hip throw.
You can play from here, pushing and pulling him, getting him to walk. The attack comes when you step forward with your outside foot and then slip your inside leg in a semi-circle, inside-to-outside around the ankle of his near leg. Your foot should never leave the mat and you should come down to your knee on that leg as you complete the half circle sweep.
As you do this, you want to be close enough to push against him with your shoulder. Don't give him any space. Circling with the leg correctly will do most of the work to get him off balance. Moving forward with the shoulder helps finish the job.
Importantly, as you take him down, step high and long with your outside foot. Your goal is to end in half guard, which isn't too hard if you make a big step. It's like a deep lunge step and I was surprised that this was the least difficult part of the technique for me to get right (keeping close early with the shoulder pressure and fully circling the leg are the hardest right now). Keep your lapel grip to force him back to his back.
A very nice takedown - and one that will probably replace (or at least join) kouchi gari. Actually, what it will probably replace is that ushiro ashi barai that I like a lot, but am more than willing to swap out for this one that Rodrigo has already studied and shown us live.
The other technique we worked on was taking the armlock from mount. Here the key detail was the Lean. This was how you got the ability to lighten your leg, as Saulo puts it, as well as keeping the arm pinned. One thing I really struggled with when trying to attack with the armlock from the mount was when the guy managed to rotate and keep me from getting what Eddie Bravo calls the "spider web" from a perpendicular angle.
There is actually a drill that will help with that mobility. I'm doing to see if I can include it on my aerobic power day (Sun/Wed) when I focus on drill-specific conditioning.
Speaking of which, I've figured out that I have very weak hip flexors to go with my relatively weak quads. Half of my problem with some of the core routines that Lindsey and Cindy have us do in their classes is that my hip flexors are too weak to keep my legs up. I never even get to the point where my abs are fatigued with some of these calisthenics.
So I'm working on something to fix that (i.e. inverted sit-ups, decline leg raises, wall sits). Interesting that both Lindsey and Cindy are big into biking, which I bet is extremely hip flexor intensive. I haven't been on a bicycle in years. But you know what they say.
