Wednesdays with Coach Tim: Standing Up In Closed Guard

Standing up in the guard is a basic move that I've struggled with throughout my time training BJJ.  I seem to be able to drill it properly (if slowly), but during sparring I very rarely make it to standing and breaking the closed guard.  Instead, I (1) try not to get stuck in someone's closed guard or (2) break the guard from sitting (which exposes me to a higher risk of triangle or omoplata submissions).

In class on Saturday we worked on what to do to prevent the double ankle sweep once you've stood up in guard, but that implies I've gotten to standing!

Coach Tim, to the rescue!

Today, I've identified where I find I have problems standing up in the guard during sparring, and asked Coach Tim to help me out.

My Attempts to Stand up in the Guard:

First, the grips I usually get are the lapels and the hip.  I'm able to keep my posture secure at this point, keeping my opponent away from me.

Second, I step forward with the leg that is on the side I have a grip on the hip.

Third, I get stuck.  One of two things happens:  Either I literally feel stuck to the mat, unable to stand up, or as I start to stand up my opponent hooks my foot, my brain yells "DANGER!" and I sit back down.

Help!

Coach Tim's Advice: 

Let's look at the major steps encountered with standing up:

1) Frames / Arm Position: 

Before you even think of lifting up your knee and replacing it with your foot, you must place yourself into the best position possible. Just like everything else in Jiu Jitsu, once you complete a movement, the stability of that position is your platform for launching your next movement. If this setup is even a little bit off, your attempts at moving forward will be easily thwarted.

Whether you prefer to control the lapels and the hip, both lapels, the lapel and sleeve is not as important as the position of your elbows for these grips. Always turn your elbow-pits and armpits away from you (creating external rotation, the same you use for a proper pushup), anchor your hands to the gi and completely close your hands. Position your elbows before you grab the gi! If you grab the gi first, the hand position will determine the elbow position. It is better to have perfect elbow position and allow your hands to fall and grab whatever material is available so we do not compromise elbow positioning.

Another good rule of thumb is to keep your head behind the belt-line of your opponent. Bringing it further forward than that places your center of gravity over the fulcrum of their hip. This makes it incredibly easy to break your posture down by pulling forward with the legs and if that is not enough, this forward pull will enable the guard player to sit up and grab your head, which, barring a huge strength discrepancy, will ALWAYS break down your posture (a spinal fault will always be addressed by your body, even if this means opening your elbows and allowing the rest of your body to fall into poor position).

Lastly, you cannot allow for any slack in your body positioning or grips. This means that wherever you hand grabs, it grabs all the material until it flush with your opponent. Your hands don't slip around, rather they attach like they're bolted into place. Your core and hips are engaged to stabilize your upper body, there is not looseness in your spinal structure. While you don't have to flex like Arnold trying to win Mr. Universe, you should have enough tension throughout your upper body that your movements do not break down the structure you have built with your grips, arms, torso and head.

2) The first step up:

We are traditionally taught to step up one leg at at time. Later, it becomes appropriate to jump both legs up simultaneously. For the purposes of learning proper bracing technique, one leg at a time is best. The most important aspect to remember about the first step up is that you are transferring weight from your hips and legs (you are sitting on your ankles, after all) into your hands so that you can step up to your foot on the mat. In order to do this, your hands must be in position to support your weight. Go back and review step #1 if this is not the case. If you are trying to stand and your training partner is pulling you with their legs, having your weight in your hands will still cause your legs to "feel light enough" to lift off the floor. You need to step forward far enough to create a 90-degree angle between your foot / ankle and your knee. Then, you need to turn this knee is so that your training partner's hip is contained between a) your knee on one side and b) your hand / elbow (depending on your grip) on the other side.

If you feel off-balance here, either a) step #1 was incorrect and you were not able to properly brace your weight or b) your foot positioning is preventing you from creating torque off of the ground which would stabilize you enough to step up your second leg. Regardless, as always, if you do not feel strong and balanced at this point, advancing forward will only make it worse! Go back and correct if necessary.

3) The second step up:

The second step up is tricky because you have elevated your entire body (relative to our starting position) yet your hands are in the same place and are still required for you to properly brace your weight. Instead of making the mistake of rounding your back OR dropping your hips below your knees (both are done to make it easier to place weight on your hands), use your braced core, grips (elbows turned in!) and knee position (turned towards their hip) to elevate your opponent's hips (rounding their back and destroying their posture) and balance on their hips. If any weight is not braced against your knee and hand positioning, your remaining leg will feel very heavy. Shift the position so that you can feel your second leg free itself from the load so you can step up.

4) Once you are standing:

You must keep your elbows tight, turned towards your body, with your elbow-pits and armpits turned away from you. Your knees should meet underneath your opponent's hips (your feet must be pointed straight forward and will be fairly close to each other). If your core is braced and the previous criteria are met, once you are standing your opponent should have their back bent and be supporting themselves only with their weight. Properly situated, they will be unable to use the double-ankle sweep because they do not have their shoulder blades on the ground and therefore cannot create the torque to push you away while controlling their ankles. In addition, if they release their closed guard, your positioning will cause them to recede away from you before their knees can make contact with their body, giving you the chance to begin passing instead of having to defend a sweep.

With regards to grip and actually opening the guard, that can take a number of directions based on a) how insistent your partner is in keeping their guard closed, b) whether or not they sit up with you as you stand and c) your relative height.

If I am opening the closed guard and my partner is shorter than I am, using my knee (same side as the hand on the hip) in their tailbone (ON their tailbone, not next to it, with your foot precisely under your knee) and then stepping my remaining leg back while using that same side hand to push their knee down is the preferred way to open the guard. This capitalizes on the height advantage by creating so much space inside the closed guard that they cannot keep it closed.

If they are taller than you, that same knee in the middle will instead slide up between their legs and you can open the guard from the kneeling combat-base position. Again, the exact mechanics used to open the guard will vary depending on height, but having a stable position (posture) to do this from is of utmost importance!

Long story short, the most appropriate way to think of standing in the closed guard is to simulate the way you sit up out of a chair without the use of your hands. Instead of trying to stand straight up vertically, which is difficult because your weight is set behind your knees, you will tend to lean forward, brace your core, and then stand up. This is the same movement for standing in the closed guard, with one additional caveat: because your partner is trying to pull you into the ground, when you begin to stand up, you arms provide a frame / brace for you to bear your weight on when that pull comes into play. This is why it is incredibly important to have the proper hand/elbow positioning so that you don't lose your own progress in standing up just because your opponent pulled down on your gi.

Working out the Kinks

The Saturday morning women's class is always my very favorite class of the week for several reasons.  This week it was my favorite class of the week because we had visitors from M3 Fight and Fitness in Montrose, CA.  The owners of M3 came up under Robot's instructors, and Rich was able to organize their ladies to make a trip to Robot.  They even had a lady purple belt for me to play with! So awesome!

This week, Coach David led the class and we worked on getting the kinks out of two things:  (1) Preventing the sweep when standing up in closed guard and (2) securing the De La Riva guard.

(1) Preventing the Sweep 

A pretty common response to having someone stand up in your closed guard is to open the guard, drop your hips, grab the ankles, and push the standing person over.  I'll admit to being a big chicken about standing up in guard because I so sincerely hate getting swept like this.

Previously, I had focused on staggering my legs as soon as possible when standing up in the guard, so that the opponent playing guard could not grab both of my feet.  Today, we worked on preventing the sweep by pushing our hips forward over the guard players hips as soon after they open the guard as possible.  From there, it is a matter of securing the guard player's legs and moving to the side -- essentially a stack pass.

The more we drilled this the more I saw how important my posture and my balance is when I'm dealing with preventing a sweep from an open guard position that hasn't hooked my legs yet -- specifically spider guard.  I've been struggling the last few weeks to figure out what to do with someone who's spider guard grips are so good that I can't pull their legs down to the ground.  Though I've been told over and over to push their legs over their head when they do that, making my hips heavy to control them, I hadn't understood it until this morning.

(2)  Securing the De La Riva (DLR) Guard 

Though we did work on several sweeps from De La Riva today, what I got out of it was (what I hope) is the final piece to figuring out why my DLR guard is so hard to maintain.  Earlier in the week, I talked several times with Coach Tim about feeling like my opponents could just step around my DLR and that the leg "stretching" them out never seemed long enough.

Coach Tim and I came up with two solutions to that problem.  First, I hadn't been fully engaging my abs.  Rather, I was letting my head and shoulders drop to the mat, which does about zero to break my opponent's posture down.  Second, because I am a super shorty (I'm only 5'2" with t-rex arms and short legs), I need to be more assertive with the pull on the sleeve, and probably even reach up and switch to the lapel grip in order to break down my opponent's posture.

Today, Coach David saw another piece to the DLR puzzle.  I get my DLR hook in, but as soon as my opponent starts to move, I drop it.  I hadn't even realized I was doing it.  I just drop it straight down.  It sounds so stupid to not realize that's what was happening, but it's the truth.  All I know is once I started actually paying attention to keeping hooked in, my opponent was having a much harder time getting out.  Now, if only I could grow some size 13 feet so that the hook would stay on a little easier! Maybe I should wear swim fins to train...

All in all, a really great day of rolling.

Wednesdays with Coach Tim: How to be a good training partner

Welcome to the inaugural "Wednesdays with Coach Tim" post!

Every Wednesday will (ideally) feature a post reflecting collaboration between me and my coach, Tim Peterson. Coach Tim has been training BJJ exclusively since he was 15, and received his black belt from Giva Santana in December of 2011.  He's also ridiculously photogenic:

This week we are covering something that is critical to learning BJJ, but that isn't formally taught:  how to be a good training partner.  There are three aspects to being a good training partner: (1) Basic etiquette, (2) drilling, and (3) sparring.

(1) Basic Training Etiquette:

• Come to learn and help your training partners learn
• Coach Tim often says you cannot learn BJJ alone.  You can't learn to submit anyone unless someone is willing to be your grappling dummy and roll with you.  You will not win every time.  A lot of learning comes from getting tapped.  Stop thinking of tapping as "losing" and start thinking of it as learning. 

• Have good hygiene 
• Clean and healthy body 
• BJJ is a close contact sport.  Be kind to your training partners, and keep yourself clean and your skin healthy.  Do not roll with contagious conditions like ringworm, athletes foot, or a cold.  

• Clean gi
• Do not roll if you do not have clean gear to roll in.  Not only does it smell (and yes, an unwashed women's gi has a funk to it), but it is unsafe for you and your training partners.  Unwashed gis and gear increase the likelihood of a staph infection.  And seriously, no one wants to be the smelly kid. 

• Trimmed nails
• Fingernails and toenails must be kept short and free of jagged edges.  Not only can a nail seriously harm your training partner, but it can get bent backwards or ripped off if it snags on a gi.  Carry clippers with you and double check your nails before class. 

• Make-up free 
• I violate this one on accident all the time, but women who roll should carry some sort of make up remover cloth with them and try to get rid of as much make-up as possible before class.  You don't want your mascara staining your training partner's gi! 

• Smile
• I overheard Mike Martinez, one of my very favorite coaches and an amazing human being, telling a little boy crying after losing a tournament that if he wasn't having fun, he wasn't doing BJJ.  I've kept that little piece of advice with me, and it has helped me keep my head straight when I'm rolling.  BJJ is a tough sport, mentally and physically.  If you aren't having fun, why are you doing it?

(2) Drilling

• Picking a Drilling Partner 
• When I first started training, I had no idea who I was supposed to train with.  Luckily, I was one of two women training and that made it pretty easy.  I'll be honest that we picked each other because we were the only women, but we also made pretty good training partners because we were the relatively the same height and weight.  Finding a drilling partner the same height and weight is important, especially when you start out, so that you aren't trying to figure out how to deal with someone 100 pounds bigger or 6 inches shorter than you in addition to mastering a completely foreign movement.  

• When there are both women and men on the mat, often women are the last to match up with a training partner.  Why?  Because the awkward goes both ways! Women are more likely to be newer at BJJ and not know as many people, and men (I think) are nervous drilling with someone who is (often) much smaller.  My solution?  Come early to class and introduce yourself around to the people stretching and warming up.  Get a feel for who is attending the class, and who is your size, and do the asking when it comes time to pick drilling partners.  The more you come to class, the more people you get to know, and the easier it is to pick a training partner.

• Drilling -- To be a limp noodle or a stiff cockroach?
• Neither! 

• Coach Tim's Advice: 
  
  
  1) A good visual guide for being a drilling partner is to try to imitate what the instructor was doing during demonstration. For example, if your instructor is teaching the armlock from the closed guard without a follow-up sweep, then during drilling the person being submitted should maintain enough tension in their body so that they don't topple over. Remember that you are generally trying to emulate your instructor's movements as closely as possible, so having your training partner imitate the sequence during instruction is vital!
  
  
  2) A good tactile guide for being a good drilling partner is to remember that tension in your core is always important and tension from your limbs is less important. An example might be useful:
  
  
   Using the same instance of the armlock from the guard we can see how core tension is appropriate. If you are using the armlock on your training partner and they have slack in their core (their abs / hips / glutes are not engaged at least slightly), then the steps that comprise the armlock (moving their arm across your body, pivoting to the side, breaking their posture and finishing the arm lock) ALL have the potential to cause your partner to topple over in an unrealistic fashion. However, if you partner maintains 20% - 50% of their tension in their core and keeps their limbs relatively relaxed, it will be easy to move their arm and drill the submission without having them a) topple over during a transition that wouldn't translate to sparring b) resisting so much with their arms that the position cannot be practiced. This is because keeping tension in your core forces your spine (from your head to your pelvis) to move in unison, which is always our goal.
  
  
  On the other hand, if you maintain tension in your limbs but not your core, you are ingraining a habit of relying on limb strength instead of generating force from your body in a unified manner. To check for core tension, have your partner lie down on their back and lift their feet and knees off the ground as if you were going to practice a bullfighter pass on them. If your partner has tension in their core, pushing their knees slightly to one side will cause the entirety of their upper body to begin rotating in that same direction, albeit not always the same amount that the knees rotate. If they lack core tension, then their knees will flop to the side while their head will still be facing straight forward. In this instance, simply lifting the back of your head off the mat will usually engage your core enough for drilling purposes.

(3) Sparring

• Picking a Sparring Partner 
• Picking a sparring partner seems scary, seems like it should be complicated, but it is exactly the same as picking a drilling partner.  At first, focus on people who are your own size.  As you get more advanced, you may feel more comfortable trying sparring partners with different body types.  If you notice someone standing on the side without a partner, and you want to roll, ask them if they are still rolling.  

• Safety first:  If there is a person at your academy who has hurt you during sparring or drilling, who goes too hard, who has a bad attitude, or in general makes you nervous about sparring with them you are allowed to politely decline an offer to roll with them.  If your academy matches people up, feel free to talk with your instructor privately if there is a particular training partner you would like to avoid for safety reasons.  

• Sparring -- how hard is too hard? 
• One of the things I love about BJJ is that, unlike a lot of other martial arts, you can go 100% in sparring.  That said, if you spar like you are competing in the finals of the IBJJF World Championships in the Pyramid, you aren't going to have very many sparring partners who regularly want to put their bodies through that kind of aggressive roll. 

• Coach Tim's Advice: 
  
  
  Sparring is too hard if someone gets injured or is sparring while on the threshold of being injured. In general, the more experienced individual will match the intensity of the less experienced individual. With that in mind, if you are rolling with someone of a higher rank, it is great to have a hard sparring session, but keep in mind that if you set a certain pace, you are generally expected to maintain that pace for the entire round. Having someone try to take my head off is great practice for me, but if they accidentally poke me in the eye, knee me in the face and then retire to the edge of the mat from exhaustion after 2 minutes, then something is wrong!
  
  
  Another good rule of thumb is that there are three general categories of sparring partners: those less experienced than you, those more experienced than you, and those at your approximate level. As long as no one is injured and their is no other glaring physical discrepancy between you and your partner then each of these partner's has a different set of qualities that allow you to improve. 
  
  
  a) Those less experienced allow you to train your worst guards, your escapes, etc. and you can also teach them counters specific to your game so that they can provide reactions for you to practice against, yet still at a speed that allows you to consciously process your follow-up counters.
  
  
  b) Those at your level allow you to test your ability to draw them into your specific game and avoid their game. You can test your conditioning with them since your technical experience may not be enough to get ahead of them. Also, it is great to ask your instructor to watch you roll with people of your level because the feedback from that will be easier to implement into your game.
  
  
  c) Lastly, those above your level allow you to ask questions, train your best positions as hard as you can and also allow you to feel the different methods they use to exert pressure on you. Watching Jiu Jitsu is useful, but feeling Jiu Jitsu is much more important. You want to feel what high-level Jiu Jitsu feels like on a regular basis so that you are constantly trying to re-create that same sensation.

A Blue Belt is Just a White Belt Who Never Stopped Training

My very first post in over a year!

There have been ups and downs and injuries and improvements, and I'll get to those in time.   The biggest thing that happened in my last year of training occurred on June 15, 2013 at Robot Fight & Fitness:

That's right! This panicky white belt got her blue belt from Tim Peterson and Giva Santana! I was honestly shocked, and had stopped worrying about it ages ago.  I don't roll for recognition or accolades.  I roll for fun.  If I'm not having fun, I'm not doing it right.  Having fun doesn't mean winning.  It means learning and figuring out the puzzle and feeling the pieces in my brain click together with my body -- even if the moment that happens is right when I realize I've made a mistake and I'm about to get tapped.

I'm still processing the promotion.  Nothing has really changed for me, though I do notice that my training partners feel more comfortable going hard with me and that white belts seem to directly ask me for advice.  I did, however, finally come to some understanding of that old saying "a black belt is a white belt who never stopped training."  I'm not the biggest or the best, and I don't get many submissions, but I've put in my time and I have learned things.  I'll keep learning, I'll keep training, and I'll keep having fun.  And someday, the blue will be black.

OSSS!!!