Fundamentals – Thursday 1st November
Hook Sweep Drills
1 – Sit-up and Superman
- Take a hooks in position while the other person kneels
- Sit up, underhook their arms on either side grabbing the lats or the shoulders and scoot your hips in close
- Lie back keeping their upper body close, lift them with your hooks and raise their arms out to the side by flaring your elbows
- Your partner stops the momentum with their hands (if they’re averse to face-planting) and you sit back up again
NB: Scooting the hips right in close helps destabilise your opponent, takes them off their base and therefore makes sweeping them a lot easier
2. Hook sweep
Building on the previous drill, we add a few features to turn it into an effective sweep
- Take a hooks in position while the other person kneels
- Underhook one arm
- Overhook the other keeping your elbow tight, wedging their arm between your arm and ribs
The Overhook: It’ll depend on the length of your opponent’s arms, but the key is to trap it at a point along the arm whereby they aren’t able to post as you sweep them to that side.
- Scoot your hips in and under their base, turning your hips toward the overhook side
- Roll back toward your shoulder on the side you’ve overhooked
- As your opponent reaches the apex/top of the sweep, disengage your hook
- Establish side control
Armbars
We covered three armbars – one from mount and two from knee-ride. The key thing to take away from this session is that the finish is the easy part. In each case, you’re applying the same technique of hyper-extending your opponent’s arm. Each particular armbar (mount, knee-ride etc) just provides a different route to to that finish.
Armbar from Mount
- Take mount
- Lean forward and smother your opponent with your chest
- Ease the smothering a bit to enable your opponent to push your weight off, extending their arms
- Pick an arm you’d like to armbar
- Bring your arm on the same side around the top of that arm
- Bring your other arm between their arms
- Press both of your palms to their chest, letting them take your weight
Keeping your weight applied to your opponent’s chest
- Hop up to your feet – foot on the attacking side next to their ear, the other one close to the far hip
- Step over their head with the attacking side foot
- Claim their arm, either with both arms or one arm grabbing the arm, the other their near leg
- Slide down their arm to sit on the floor
- Squeeze your knees to trap their arm
- Weld their little finger to your chest, ensuring their elbow is turned the correct way
- Lie back – SLOWLY – to apply pressure to the elbow joint until they tap
Key points:
Hip penetration – get your hips as close to their shoulder as you can as you slide down the arm. This means that:
a) They have a lot more work to do to extricate their arm
b) Your hips are in an optimal position to apply pressure to the elbow joint, rather than going hell for leather to try and break their forearm.
If you don’t end up with your hips in close, keep the arm secure and just scoot your hips closer. Then lie back for the finish.
Squeeze the knees! You need to trap that arm and keep it on the right angle to ensure the tap
Knees bent -Particularly with the knee closest to their head, you want that knee bent and the heel pulled in against their neck. This enables you to drive high with the hips if necessary to apply additional pressure to the elbow joint.
As you become more confident, you can dispense with the initial jump to the feet and just swing your legs straight round for the armbar.
NB: If you lose control and fall back prematurely, let your partner’s arm go!
Near armbar from knee-ride
Start from side-control, controlling their far shoulder and blocking their near hip
- Switch hands, grabbing the gi on their near arm at the elbow, your other arm controlling their hip on the other side
- Pressing both fists to the mat, jump up to knee ride
- Pull their arm toward the ceiling, extending it away from their body
- On the knee-ride leg, push your hips forward so there is a straight line from your hip to your knee
- Step over their head with the leg closest to their head
- Sit in close, controlling the arm
The remaining steps observe the same principles as the mount arm-bar, with the exception that your knee-ride leg is on the near side of your opponent’s body
- Squeeze the knees
- Weld the little finger to the chest
- Lie back – SLOWLY – to apply pressure to the elbow joint until they tap
- Raise your hips to apply extra pressure if they’re particularly flexible
Also: If you have reasonably long legs, it can help to bring the knee-ride leg parallel with their body – knee pointing toward their feet – as you step over for the armbar. As you sit down you just raise your knee upright, trapping the arm and squeezing together with the other knee.
Far armbar from knee-ride
Take knee-ride
- Your opponent tries to push your knee off with their far hand, creating a space between their elbow and ribs
- Reach under their tricep with your arm closest to their legs
- Pull them toward you into your shins, creating space under their back
- Step around with the leg closest to their head, wedging your foot and shin into their lower back
- Spin to face the way you came from
- Make sure you’ve claimed the arm
As with the other armbars, the rest of the details are the same
- Make sure you have good hip penetration
- Squeeze the knees
- Weld the little finger to the chest
- Lie back SLOWLY
- Raise your hips if necessary to get the tap.
