5/24/2010 - Monday

Kettlebells - Still hiding behind the hand injury. that is about to change.

BJJ - Pretty good class of people. 12-13 or so. I remain pleased with the retention rate of the new people coming to the club. We are seeing a slow trickle of people, but we keep a higher percentage than any time I have been here. We did the hook sweep position that I use quite a bit. John had some points that were different than I stress, so it was good to get a different take on it. He uses a slightly different hand position. I like mine a little more but it was interesting to see the subtle difference. It took awhile for most of them to get it, but several were doing quite well by the end. Jason in particular will be hard to stop once he figures out the first position a little better. The next variation we did was just riding over the stepped up defensive leg by continuing up. There are a lot of good positions that evolve from here. Not sure how many we will do this week, but, there are a lot of good classes from the beginning of this position. I did two sets. I took the two stripe blue belt who has joined us, Evan. He is a bit of a head hunter, looking guillotine and grabbing the head a little more than I like but he fought hard and didn't seem to mind when I raised the level of play after he grabbed my head the second time. He will be a decent training partner and a nice change of pace from some of the same sets I always see. I rolled with the purple Mike B next. Pretty good player. He plays hard but not crazy tries a very technical approach to passing and the guard when he is on the bottom. I swept, he defended, we scrambled and I ended on top. Passed the halfguard and worked and caught an Ude Garame (it was a lot harder than it sounds, there were several near escapes where he almost made it back to guard or to the turtle). When we stated again, i went for the hook sweep and after some positional movement I rolled him backl over for it, but his head was caught and his neck twisted. Not too bad, but we had to stop. I thought we should call it but he wanted to continue so I pulled again. I went to the De La Riva position and was able to take him backwards before the set ended.

Judo
Good sized class but there are a lot of injuries right now. Alma did warmups and a few drills form the clinic she attended. I focused on the one handed (lapel hand) tsurikomi Goshi because I find that many, including myself are struggling with this part of the hip throw. It took a while for most of them to get to where I thought they were making progress, but by the end there was some improvement. I emphasized going deeper and lower to get the hips to the correct position, so this works two problems, bending the knees more and keeping the lapel grip in the proper place. I am going to do this quite a bit I think this summer.
Randori was unremarkable except Greg, one of the few healthy players injured his ankle with Roman. He was just settling in for a good summer of training. i hope this doesn't discourage him after the injury lay off he just had.

We did the anatomy of a choke class for Ne waza. Most of them made some progress on being able to properly apply a choke