Monday, August 26, 2013

BJJ, 8/26/13

Tonight I visited the local BJJ school. I'd like to try to return to training there, but we'll see how things shake out.

After a warmup, we drilled some entries into a double-leg takedown. Then we practiced a kind of arm-drag-to-takedown. Similar to the one in this video:



The main instruction for tonight's class was the scissor sweep and the circle (or "flower" or "pendulum", if you like) sweep (videos at the end of this post, for referrence). The scissor sweep was familiar to me, and seemed to work better than it used to during the short time I tried BJJ 3+ years ago. The circle sweep is one I vaguely remember, but was never one I had much luck with. Tonight it felt good, at least while drilling. I need to remember that whichever of my arms has most of uke's arms determines which foot I use to push off his hip with. That makes sense to me, which is ok, since this is mainly to help my retention!

After drilling those two sweeps for a while, it was time to roll. My first round was with a blue belt. Very nice round. He's a very technical guy and didn't have anything to prove to a no-stripe white belt. I think I did ok, even though he was obviously not trying to smoke me. Round two was against a one-stripe white belt that I am positive weighs 50% more than me. Different story here. Apparently he felt like going hard, so he bulldozed me most of the time. No way for me to deal with his mass. I just kept Saulo Ribeiro's counsel in mind: "As a white belt, your job is just to learn how to survive."  I tapped early to an armbar he didn't really have in order not to risk injury to an enthusiastic partner. I tapped once to suffocation that amounted to him just laying on top of me. Other than that, I felt like I did an okay job on defense. I could mount no offense though. Round three was with a much lighter kid than me. Apparently he was only 16 or so. Yellow belt, or some junior rank. I didn't try to kill him. I pulled guard and worked from there the entire 5 minutes. I felt pretty safe, so I experimented with some posture-breaking I learned from a Kid Pelligro app last week. It seemed to work well. I crept closer and closer to a choke, but never got there before time was up.

Overall, it was an intense class, but very enjoyable. I hope to be back soon.

Scissor sweep:


Circle/flower/pendulum sweep:


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