Training Day: Monday

A whole lot of the kind of training I really like: a little self-defense followed by about half an hour of nothing but scissor sweeps.

It may not be the most exciting training for some.  But as far as learning is concerned, there really isn't anything better than taking one key technique and working it over and over and over.  We aren't at the technological singularity yet, and can't quite assimilate knowledge like they do on the Nebuchadnezzar.  So the only alternative, as Daniel Coyle writes in his excellent book, The Talent Code, is the slow, often-painful process of forging muscle memory, building the neuro-circuitry that will allow you to access what Rickson Gracie famously called "the place beyond knowledge."

Some good training with new Gracie Barra Seattle purple belt Kyle, and blue belt Cordelia, a judo black belt if I overheard correctly, with very good movement on top (i.e., spinning armbar, kimura set-ups) that had me scrambling to recover guard.  And a great guard/pass guard specific training with Mark during the Open Mat (four two-minute rounds).  I might start spending every Open Mat with this kind of training.

I also got to work on some of my rear mount escape demons, specifically Saulo's detail about falling to the side rather than straight back, and trapping the fall-side leg BELOW the knee rather than above it.  Felt like a breakthrough.  We'll see what happens the next time I'm rolling with one of those casca-grossas from the last few weeks.

A very heavy 162 on the mat post-train.  At least it's Monday.  Should be a very heavy week of training as I try and set a new training year record of 163 sessions in a year (August - July).  To get there, I've got to train every day this week - twice on Friday - and then on Monday and Tuesday of next week.  It shouldn't have been this hard; a few more sessions this spring and I'd be waltzing across the finish line in front.  But, things being as they are, I'm just going to have to take the long road to the goal.

Focus, Fortitude, and Other Effing

One thing that I definitely did not like about Wednesday's training was that I didn't get a chance to work on the Effing Series.  I did try to look for Effing pass opportunities during one roll, and that's how the opportunities are going to come up outside of drilling.  But I want to make sure I don't drift.

Roger Gracie made the point a year or so ago: you want to have a focus or a goal in mind every time you train. Most of the time, if you take the class before the Live Training session, then you probably are going to have to forget about that focus or goal for an hour or so, and try and absorb as much as you can from the lessons.  And when the Live Training comes - to say nothing of any specific training opportunity - it is always a good idea to try and incorporate some of what you learned or reviewed that day.

But this is also the time when you have to circle back to what your focus and goal is for the limited time you have (two 8-10 minutes sessions, maybe a third if we're lucky, for most of us, on average, three or four times a week). This is why it's a pretty good idea to have very general, limited goals for a stretch of a couple of months.  It can get chaotic trying to assimilate new information with every class, retain and improve upon what you learned a week or two or more ago, and still carve into muscle memory those familiar strategies and techniques that help you get from the bottom to the top.  Or finish from the bottom.  Or finish from the top.

The Effing pass gives me a unified field theory for the open guard.  But I'm not nearly as precise against the half guard as I should be given my preference for the half guard as an attack from the bottom.  I don't feel as if I'm running into a lot of especially sophisticated half guard sweeping attacks.  I'm just not taking a methodical approach to getting the pass.

At the end of the day, any one of the passes I've learned will be fine.  The trick, though, is to find something that fits as well as the Effing pass has started to fit when it comes to the open guards.  Backstep passes are very popular.  But I'll admit that as long as I'm not completely caught unawares, I feel like I've always got at least a 50/50 shot against a backstep pass.  I know that control of the inside leg, the ability to switch your hips as if to go belly down, is critical to winning that initial battle, that there's a roll to the back and a kneebar worth watching out for, as well.

What I've had the hardest time beating, though, is the "Base Switch Pass with Shin" as Saulo calls it (35-3 in Jiu-Jitsu University, which you should own.).  If I there's no space for the head, then it is easy to set up an irresistible pressure against the legs.  There's also a shin-slide, 35-6, that I remember using more frequently years ago.  It sets up a lot of pressure and is another of those half guard passes that I personally hate to defend against.

Another option, a third one to try and keep things "general" and "limited", is to bait deep half.  I don't have a lot of defenses against deep half.  But I feel as if I know a good response and can bring it faster than most deep half attacks I've had to deal with.  A lot of people are still treating the deep half like a "guard" like spider guard or closed guard or something, when it's a guard that should be as fluid as a takedown.  Arguably, deep half is an anti-guard, moreso even than the X-guard.  Arguably, deep half is a quantum guard that is both guard and sweep at the same time.

Other things, too.  But this is more than enough to get started.

The Slippery Hills

When we see people practice effectively, we usually describe it with words like willpower or concentration or focus. But those words don't quite fit, because they don't capture the ice-climbing particularity of the event. The people inside the talent hotbeds are engaged in an activity that seems, on the face of it, strange and surprising. They are seeking out the slippery hills. Like Clarissa, they are purposely operating at the edges of their ability, so they will screw up. And somehow screwing up is making them better. How?

--from "The Sweet Spot," The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

Got Your High Percentage Guard Passes

Right here.

Mundials 2004: Best Guard Passes: BJJ DVD Project

Or at least through the World Championships of 2004. If the highest percentage submissions (courtesy of Lloyd Irvin Labs) are the RNC, kimura and triangle, then the highest percentage guard passes (and who doesn't need one of those?) are somewhere in the data above.

Deep Practice

"Frank Shamrock told us he would teach him one thing a day, just one thing only. BJ will do it five, six hundred times and he'll have it in his arsenal for good. They'll use it the next day, and they keep building and building."

--Jeff Blatnik, speaking of B.J. Penn during the B.J. Penn/Din Thomas fight at UFC XXXII

Guard Passing and Circuit Building with Shaolin

More great stuff from Stephan Kesting and Vitor Ribeiro.

CBDP: Knee Shield Entry to Deep Half

Bumpshove

Legdrag

Divecurl

Like a Chisel to the Stone

"... it's not as pollyannish as I'm trying to suggest. A lot of the conversations that I have with people tend to be brutally honest, because I think the task of a trading coach or a guide is to confront people, to wake them up, to throw cold water in their face to really get them to see how much they have decided to produce the results that they are producing. That the results aren't by chance, but they are because the individual has made a decision, conscious or unconscious, to produce certain results."

--Dr. Ari Kiev

CBDP: Slingshot Armdrag to the Back

Circuit-Building Deep Practice: Slingshot Armdrag to the Back

Slingshot Armdrag ...

1. Wedge
2. Kick
3. Grip
4. Pull

... to the Back

1. Lat
2. Post
3. Hip
4. Hook

Deep Practice Alert: Braulio Estima

From an article by Caleb of The Fightworks Podcast, Gracie Barra's Braulio Estima star at the 2009 ADCC Championship

This technique comes very natural for my game. It’s a technique I’ve actually been doing since I was a blue belt. It’s not a new technique. It’s just a natural thing that I mastered since the last tournament. I’ve been training this technique a lot in preparing for the Abu Dhabi. I even texted [my brother] Octavio saying, 'Man I’ve been training a lot of reverse triangles, so watch out for the reverse triangle, I’m going to get a lot of people in that.' It was funny because I managed to get the toughest guy in it.

Deep Practice Alert: Semerzier v. Fabiano

More on the WEC 43 contest between Mackens Semerzier v. Wagnney Fabiano from MMA Junkie

Fabiano was on top of Semerzier when he briefly stood up and then moved back into the fight-ending hold. The WEC newcomer said the closing seconds of the bout included a sequence he's drilled countless times.

"We work on it all the time," Semerzier told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "I got a butterfly (guard). It was half-guard, and I stuck in a butterfly. I started to lift him a little bit, and I didn't think he liked it. He decided to come out and come back in, and I was lucky enough to get a triangle."