BJJ, 2/23/10

I’ve never choked someone completely unconscious…until last night...

Last night I decided to go to our school’s “BJJ Fundamentals” class instead of the regular class. I really enjoyed it. The format was laid-back, and the Professor went over some very basic concepts. We worked on the basic collar choke, and looked at key details for making it work. These included the deepness of the grip, turning your thumbs toward the guy’s head, turning your knuckles toward you, how to grab his shoulder over the top if he’s blocking your second hand (hard to explain by typing), and “answering the phone” or ducking under to defend against the choke. We also worked on 2 butterfly guard passes, one as a response to bottom guy trying to choke you. I need to remember that if I’m in someone’s butterfly guard, I want to get them on their back, and not let them sit up (but careful not to push in a way that exposes my arms to attacks).


The fundamentals class doesn’t include rolling, just instruction, and drilling the basics. While we were drilling the standard choke, we did so from standing, just to work on the details. On one rep, I apparently accidentally got the choke correct right off the bat, because my partner evidently didn’t have time to tap. I was about to ask him “Do I not have the choke? Am I missing something?” when he crumbled to the floor, unconscious. He was an older guy, so I was worried about what might have happened – not a good feeling! Thankfully he was fine, if a bit confused. He got up looking like he didn’t know where he was. I kept apologizing to him, because this was his first class, and assured him I had no idea I had put it on him like that. He was gracious, and a good sport. I can laugh about it now, but I felt horrible about it last night.

I'm becoming more dangerous by the day, haha.

Judo, 2/6/10

Still behind on some posts, but catching up…


In our Judo lesson, we worked on our 3 entries to hip throws (mostly uchikomi). That’s what we ended up working on for most of the lesson. We did play with Osotogari a little, with the same three entries, then we looked at a combo for a little while: failed hip throw, to ouchi, to kouchi.


Lastly, we worked on something from goshin jutsu that’s sort of like a shomenate/osotogari hybrid that felt completely, incredibly bad@$$. Taking a fall from a normal osoto is bad enough, but at least you have tori’s gi to hold on to. Not so with this technique. It’s would be a bad fall to take full force, at least at my skill level of ukemi.

Aikido, 2/6/10

Okay, I'm really behind on posting lately, but I'll catch up this week. I have an additional aikido, and 2 judo posts to write. So here are my notes on our aikido lesson from February 6::::

We started with Tegatana. Pat said he was thinking about the need to get the following foot back under your center quickly. He gave some examples of how this shows up in karate as well. It’s funny how throughout the rest of the morning, this idea came up again and again, both in our Aikido lesson and Judo.


We went through releases 1-8, camping out on #4, which I seemed to be okay at that day. I was only thinking about timing it with uke’s footfall, and it seemed to make a big difference. We camped on 4 and 8 for quite a while. Numbers 6 and 8 usually give me trouble, so we looked at what was causing my feeling of “discontinuity” during those techniques. I think my steps have been going something like “Left, right, right” on those, instead of “left, right, left, right”. Once we dealt with that I started getting better results. It sort of went back to Pat’s “Happy Feet” idea.

Then we played with variations of #4, leading into Chain #4. We finished up class with some light randori.


You know how when you eat an incredibly rich dish, it’s really good, but so good you can barely eat it? That’s sort of how both our Aikido and Judo lessons were that morning – so chock full of savory richness I don’t think I retained most of it. Hopefully it will stick in my subconscious though. ;o)