12/02/2010 Gripping day at Osagame

Judo - We did a full class on gripping. It was an advanced group and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to work with the more senior people on this important skill. We did the basic 1,2,3 grip system and several variations. We also talked about cutting off the mat with movement of the feet/hips and not chasing and reaching with the hands. We talked about how gripping and strategy can be technically superior players. It may be even more important for BJJ players as good grip fighting can be learned and utilized faster than 100,000 throws can be accomplished. Plus if your gripping is good enough you can often get BJJ players who lack confidence on their feet to jump, sometimes to jump guard poorly rather than lose the stand up fight.

We did randori sets. Marco mixed in well and is showing a greater willingness to engage more aggressively. The Judo idea of imposition of will both through grips and forcing a technique against a 100% resisting opponent is very important. Throwing opportunistically is great, but walking to someone and throwing them in something they know is coming but can't stop is more fun for me. Robert got Tani Otoshi and had a little crackle but fortunately seemed uninjured.

For BJJ we worked on getting to and submitting the opponent from the mounted position. We covered several entries to the mount and the basic X choke I use as well as several ideas about holding the mount. I like it because it's a big scoring position and allows an easy transition to the bottom if I choose to allow the transitions, but, it's also, in many ways the final expression of dominance in the chain of BJJ techniques. Takedown, pass the guard, knee in the belly, mount, submit. This is the technical chain i would aspire to achieve. If you get to mount and they can't get away, then you have dominated them, and if you can submit from their, then you controlled the match.
I trained with Sarah, who continues to improve. Being the smallest and the lowest ranked does wonders for people who are competitive and really want to get better. they are constantly challenged to improve and the learning curve in this type of situation is quite steep. I had a set with Eric. After the way he was so far ahead of me in our last set, I ha a much better set, this time. Finally I did a set with Marco, Usually we start with a little bit of flowing through positions, and then the competitiveness increases and we play harder.  The flowing time as we warm up is decreasing so we start playing harder a little earlier. It feels good to be pushed and have a chance to train hard, so these Thursday sets are becoming some of my favorites. Wit Marco, Eric and Sarah in the class, if we can Allessandro back who was unavailable this class and maybe get Lex into it, the training quality will be very good. I think I would like to try to make this the key BJJ class of the weekdays. It starts later and has a good lead in from the Judo class. We will see how it develops.