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.