Martial Arts Wellington 272 Taranaki St GSW BJJ NZ

Archive for November, 2007

We quickly reviewed the Basic Circuit and drilled it a few times

The remainder of the session focused on figure-four armlocks

Figure-Four from Mount

You are attacking from mount, with your opponent underneath, keeping their arms in tight

• Take an upright posture
• Take your torso slightly off-centre so you’re facing about 45 degrees toward the arm you’re about to attack
• Keeping your arms locked straight, grab your opponent’s wrist with both hands next to each other, palms down
• Use the weight of your body and your ‘big fat head’ to drive their arm to the mat

With the arm nearest their head:

• Keep the grip on their wrist
• Drop your elbow to the mat so your forearm is at 90 degrees to their body

With your other arm:

• Reach underneath their tricep to grab your own wrist

With your ‘figure-four’ grip, you can now:

• Slide their arm down toward their feet
• ‘Paintbrush’ the back of the hand along the mat as you…
• Raise their elbow toward the ceiling for the tap

Key point for all figure-4s:

Make sure you preserve a 90 degree angle between your opponent’s forearm and shoulder

Lower figure-four from Side Control

You have your opponent in side control – one arm controlling their far shoulder, the other the near hip

With the arm controlling their hip:

• Grab their far arm, palm down, at the wrist
• Reach under their tricep with your other arm to grab your own wrist
• Drop your hip to the mat and stretch your leg out behind you (leg closest to their legs)
• Take your other leg and use the inside of your knee to keep their head pinned to the floor
• Slide their arm toward their head
• Raise their elbow toward the ceiling for the tap

Figure-Four from Front Control/North South

Start in side control. For this example, let’s say you’re on their right side, knees in, controlling their far shoulder with both of your arms. Your opponent’s left arm is over your right shoulder clasping onto your back

• Start to walk your legs around to the left, keeping your hips low
• Shift your right hand to their right hip to stop them reguarding as you move
• Follow your legs with the rest of your body so you end up facing toward your opponent’s feet (front control/north south)
• Drive your left hand under your opponent’s armpit and toward their chin, as if you’re trying to uppercut them
• Your aim now is to apply as much of your weight as possible down through your left shoulder, wedging your forearm between their left bicep and ribs – if you’re doing it right their head will pop up and turn a lovely shade of red

For the figure-four

• Grab their right wrist with your right hand
• Bring your right knee in to the right of their head
• Grab your own wrist with your left hand
• Pull their arm up and away from their body so they’re forced onto their right side, exposing their back
• Step your left leg into to the small of their back
• Pull their elbow into your stomach, maintaining the figure four grip
• Turn your torso to the left, taking their arm in the same direction to get the tap

Finer points:

To maximise the weight down through your shoulder, come right up on your toes and lift your hips up

For the finish: If you’ve turned as far as you can go and they still won’t tap, step your left leg out to give you more space to turn into.

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.

While some of you were out wrapping toilet paper around people’s trees or scabbing lollies off old ladies, here’s what we were doing at GSW.

Similar to Monday’s class the concept was to take an element of the syllabus, in this case escapes, and combine the separate moves into a drill

Escape Drill

• Elbow escape from mount
• Side control escape to knees
• Headlock escape to back
• Headlock escape to knees
• Rolling headlock escape
• 1/2 Guard Escape
• Standing guard pass

The one that seemed to give most people problems tonight was the standing guard pass, so here’s a review of some of the key points

Standing Guard Pass

• Establish an upright posture
• Grab both your partner’s lapels at the chest and lower down around the stomach
• Try and keep your rearmost elbow back, inside their thigh – you’ll need to suck it back if they open their legs
• Come up on your knee and drive forward with your hips
• Hop up onto both your feet
• Swing your hips forward, using momentum to help lift your partner up off the ground
• Lock your knees together underneath your partner to form a base for their weight
• Release your forward hand grip

Then:

• Bring your heels off the floor
• Drop your heels and…
• Drive down with your free hand on the inside of your partner’s knee, ‘encouraging’ their legs to open, dropping them to the floor

To pass:

• Pull the hand gripping their gi back to your hip, maintaining the grip
• Put your shoulder under their leg on your free hand side
• Get a thumb in collar grip with your free hand on their opposite collar
• Drive forward with both legs
• Walk around, shrug their leg off and take side control