1,2,3, baby tell me how's my knee? you look just fine, now i'm really going to make you fly!

I've decided not to go train Mondays, but need to make it the other days.

We've got morning classes now, I'd like to work those into my day and I'm curious about what effect that'll have on the rest of my day.

Yesterday:
We started out training take downs.

Big Circle:
Hand on same side lapel, hand on same side seam. Pull opponent toward you, hip into their hip, same side leg across theirs so you're setting them up for a trip, then just look over your shoulder.

Little circle:
big circle fails, so you move the foot for big circle onto the back of their other foot. From here you just kind of.. shin forward which causes them to fall, or you can pick their foot and hold on.

Toss:
Both fail, but now the opponent is setup. I noticed a TRIANGLE OF ACTION here. Basically, triangles are the shit.. if you ever see a person's body positioned like a triangle, you know where their center of gravity is. In this instance, you simply move close, drop to your knees, load your hands up and pull them across your back so they flip over your head.


Then we moved onto guard-escapes, sweeps and submissions:
Guard to Triangle:
Guard to belly-down Armbar:
Guard to situp sweep:
guard to omaplata:
guard to guillotine:

A lot of these seem foggy in my head now, but I learned something important from the situp sweep: when you go to move, do so explosively and slap your foot off the ground opposed to kicking it and trying to use momentum.

I feel comfortable with: the omaplata, situp sweep, guillotine. Less so with the triangle and even less so with the belly-down armbar.

I also think I'm forgetting some of the things we trained last night.

North-South Escapes & Deep Thoughts

SO, three weeks have passed,
I've been skipping Monday & Tuesday, I'll elaborate as to why toward the end of this article.

IN BJJ, I'm often using my legs wrong. I love to pull them up toward my head and use them like a vice to move people. It doesn't always work. It mostly doesn't work.

But we've been trying North-South escapes and one of the moves is similar to just that!

Basically, you pull your foot up, grab it at your toes on the same side, tuck it between their legs and 'flex' your leg in such a way that it easily takes you to their back. So friggen' simple!

Another escape, you use your head as a fulcrum on their knee - it's important to remember to grab their knee when you do this so they can't easily base out. Once your head is in position, you just bridge and push from your far side, across them, your head prevents them from basing and they fall. you assume side control.

Another escape was to swing your legs back and forth to build up momentum, then kick your knees into their stomach and go for mount or attack the arms.


Another thing I am very happy to have learned is an arm-pick from side control where you use the tip of your elbow to scoop their arm, you lock your arm behind their head so their arm is trapped accross their neck and then apply pressure. This chokes them out.

If you can't quite get that last choke, you can then grab their other, free arm, move into a high mount and now you've got both their arms.

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In free rolling I pulled off a lot of that, including an actual-speed triangle! For the first time! Woo!!

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Lastly, I've found myself ADDICTED to bjj - and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Similar addicts say it's good, but I'm not sure how i feel. It's easy to become satisfied by the gains I"m making there while more tangable personal growth efforts fall to the wayside. I've been skipping monday and tuesday to get some of that motivational pressure back in my life, but I literally end up feeling depressed when I don't train! At first, when I missed a day or two, I thought I was depressed for other reasons, but that emotional pressure went away after I trained. I don't like being obligated to things and I miss the pressure to be more - if I were to plot my learning, reading and training, outside of BJJ - it would have taken a nose-dive when I joined BJJ.

My gym opened up morning classes, I think I may start going to those in conjunction with my normal training times. I'm going to try and get my schedule to three classes and at least one open mat a week.

Our gym also stepped itself up; we have more water barrels so we won't run dry, they installed carpeting and furniture for waiting parents, covered all the outlets and open vents, put proud stickers on the window. The gym leader quit his day job to do this full time. It's very nice!

These are the things on my plate:
Breathing, Not Spaz, Posture, hooking my feet in their transition.
Arm Bar, Arm Tuck attack, Triangle, omaplata.
Arms in, Elbows in, turtle, side control escape.