Recently in the grappling forum over at Sherdog, someone started a thread about aggressiveness in jiu jitsu.
One of the things I've learned from studying Marcelo Garcia is that aggressiveness in jiu jitsu comes primarily from having a plan, a 1-2-3-reset/transition-1-2-3 that gets you from unfamiliar or poor situations to better ones, and from familiar or good situations to finishes. In a sense, it is so clear, so obvious. But nothing undermines that obviousness like the calculus of physical combat, the ever more divisible units of anticipation, reaction, deception and panic.
So the trick is to turn that calculus into, at worst, algebra, cornering the variables with as many constants as you can. On my way to training Friday I get caught by the bridge so I'm going through my progressions from the 2 on 1 while Otis Smith thumps on the iPod: hook sweep, arm drag, cross to back ...
What I missed, and what could have served me well during my toughest roll of the day, was the gi grip break. I had just been reviewing this grip break earlier today. But when the opportunity to use it came, I couldn't put it together and ended up trying the no gi version - which didn't stand a chance.
Knowing what to do makes it a lot easier to move from one attack to another, makes it easier to be aggressive even if "aggressiveness" is against your nature or your "style". A little pick up in the pace, sure. A little more determination and patience, yes. But, more than anything else, it trick - the technical trick of it all - seems to boil down to just having a map of the terrain, and a means of getting back to that terrain if you find yourself off course.
For all my time working on the half guard, this is my biggest weakness with the position. Right now, my half guard is really just a set of moves from different spots - not unlike my guard passing game - rather than a coherent start-to-finish plan for getting to the top from half guard (or, again, for passing the guard). I haven't been evolving the position like I should have, introducing the shin block more frequently from long half, making the deep half a bigger priority when the space is there.
Learning a new guard set-up like the 2 on 1 at this point in my jiu jitsu training really exposes the deficiencies in my current half guard game, a game that has carried me through blue and purple belts and is still a large part of what I do when I end up on the bottom. But in order to make the half guard really work for me at this level and against the bigger, better guys I'm increasingly training with, I need to turn my half guard into the sort of problem-solving equation that will allow me to be more aggressive, spend less time on the bottom and create better opportunities for myself to get to the top.
156.6 on the scale post-train. A week out from the Seattle Open, that's just about perfect. Competition team training tomorrow. I'm still trying to decide what I'm going to do about next week, but there's a fairly good chance that I'll be spending at least one or two evenings navigating the 405.
