I am always amazed at how much jiu jitsu is lurking in the half hour or so after class or open mat ends. Sometime after one o'clock on Saturday, I found myself in the company of black and brown belts going over technique - including a pair of attacks from side control (armlock and back take) and a pair half guard passes involving trapping the guy's leg triangle by grabbing a foot and doing a shoulder roll, both of which lead to back takes.
Saturday training was a pretty full course - even Sauleh stopped by to train with some of the higher belts. By the end of the day, we had at least four black belts on the mat and two or three brown.
We worked on our standup/sprawl drill, then some work freeing our butterfly guard from a guard passer who was trapping the hips and pinning the hooks. Rodrigo has been emphasizing some of these jiu jitu strategies for dealing with aggressive and strong opponents, and it's nice to see how some of the basic movements - extending the hooks, backstepping with the underhook - are perfectly capable of dealing with the typical "wrestler" style opponent.
Jeff and Gina stopped by to award Rodrigo the trophy for both the Gi and Overall titles for the November 2009 Revolution event. Both Rodrigo and Jeff said some pretty positive things about teamwork and teambuilding that were nice to hear - it was a sizeable class, somewhere around 26 folks, and a lot of them either relatively new or visitors, and I appreciated them getting to hear a little a bit about what our jiu jitsu community is all about.
Got in some tatame after a big group picture with the twin trophies. I rolled with a blue belt from the new Gracie Barra Buckley academy who at least twice took advantage of my bad balance to reverse me out of side control. It felt very much like the kind of barrel roll out of north/south that I've done in the past and was a good reminder to make sure I've got my base in place.
Old School continues to work from half guard. I'm doing a better and better job of really forcing the other guy to make a decision about that sweep before making my counter. I'm still not working in the Slingshot, which is a big problem because now is the perfect time to be trying everything I wanted to add to my game: slingshot guard, cross guard, butterfly guard, Roger Gracie from Mount (RGFM), Rap Star guard ...
I've give myself half a point for the nine-count slingshot armdrag Deep Practice maneuvers I drilled slo-mo before class started. Anything to get even the most initial circuitry in place. I know that the slingshot armdrag and sweep will be big winners if I can ever get them into place. It's funny that compared to the tripod and "Simone" sweeps I was able to hit out of the blue earlier this week, the work out of the slingshot guard has been that much more slow in coming.
A nice day on the mat. 154.6 on the scale post-training. I felt a little more fatigued than I would have liked. But that might have been owing mostly to the apple I had for breakfast. A little more fuel might have given me another 10 minutes of sparring.
That said, the post-training session was great. Two new ways to not only pass the half guard but to take the back from the half guard pass. Rodrigo said that some of these moves he was picking up were from the Mendes brothers - the ones who unleashed the feared 50/50 guard on the world. It was fun to feel as if I were a part of the laboratory - a jiu jitsu extension officeworker in Seattle - helping build the art one experiment at a time.
Thanksgiving schedule at GB Seattle: Open mat on Thursday 10 am - 12 noon. No training Friday. Open mat on Saturday 11 am - 1 pm. I'm angling for a MTRF week next week. And if I'm lucky, a MTWR week leading into Thanksgiving to keep my 4x/week training pace.
