Made it to the academy a little late, but managed to get in some good drilling and sparring before I had to make my mad dash out.
Rodrigo is continuing with the sitting guard/butterfly guard/Cobra guard sweeps and back-takes. On Friday, we alternated between two back-takes, the first was the counter to the collar grap where you break the grip and attack with the arm drag.
The second was a little new. Here, you had a same side collar grip (not too deep) and a grip on the pants at the knee on the other side. Generate momentum by pushing and pulling with your collar grip: you want to open up his arm on the other side, the side where you have the pants grip, so maybe pulling on the collar and pushing on the knee will encourage the guy to try and post with the arm on the knee grip side.
In any event, you want to duck under the arm on the knee grip side. As with the version from the other night (which, in retrospect, was a warm-up drill for this move), you want to use that intermediate "kickstand" move with your lower leg when you are knee down before you go to posture up after you duck under the arm.
It's a 1-2-3, and you want to make sure that you come down with your knee, the outer leg that does most of the work, behind the guy's back when you finish the #3 move. That contact will help make sure you've got him in position.
A pretty good time on the tatame. I'm continuing to focus on standing guard passing almost exclusively, and with some nice progress already. With regard to finishes, I was able to get the collar choke twice on Friday, which is a nice sign of continued effectiveness with another 2010 point of emphasis.
I think I've figured out to main things - one for standing to pass the guard and one for the collar choke - that might make both of these projects all the more worthwhile studies for this year. If I get the time, I'll expand on these ideas ina later post, especially what I'm learning about standing guard passes from watching Anderson Silva size up and demolish his opponents in the UFC.
