One thing Friday's training revealed was my weak guard replacement from the side control escape. My escapes from side control are generally about securing the underhook, walking out, and then drop stepping to knees. Today, we spent a lot of time working on the guard replacement as an escape from side control, which requires a different fundamental movement, the "bumpscape", that I need to train more often individually.
The bumpscape is a vertical bump combined with a hipscape without resetting your feet. It's a very quick explosive, movement, an UP AWAY one-two. The key point with the bumpscape is that because of the bump, you don't have time to reposition your feet wider to do a really good escaping hipscape. Instead, you just have to pivot, as near to the apex of the bump as possible, shifting your hips outward and getting on to your side.
I drilled this a little in between lessons during class, and then put in three minute rounds, one each side, focusing on the bumpscape. It has some similar characteristics to the dropstep - arguably, the bumpscape is halfway between the dropstep and the hipscape. But more drilling will help this move fall into place.
Better in the half guard against bigger/stronger today. My focus was on getting small and sideways and not getting stretched out and flat on my back. I wasn't able to get the sweep I wanted. But my positioning was far better than its been in weeks, and I was able to launch the right attacks - even if they didn't reach their objective.
A little stymied against the knee shield half guard. My usual move it to step back and force an open guard, but that just led to stand ups so I decided to try and pass it on the ground. Not my preference against bigger/stronger; the trick here may be to try and steer the game toward the Effing Pass, something I've been thinking about as a different way to attack the half guard without revealing the open guard pass attack that's coming.
Was 161.8 after training. 159.8 after post-training conditioning (2 rounds 3-minute bumpscapes, 1 round 4-minute technical lifts).
