Tonight's Practice - 8.25.2008

Tonight's practice was a lot of fun. I practiced the new techniques with Rhet (not sure of the spelling heh) tonight and rolled with him also. I really like sparring with him as I feel he's better than me, but doesn't totally dominate me whenever we roll. He's a white belt like me, but been there awhile longer.

Anyways, as for what we learned tonight. It started off with escaping from an armbar using a move called "the hitchhiker." Gets it names from how you point your thumb when you bridge and roll. Sort of hard to explain the whole technique, so I found a video instead! haha



Here him mention the thumb? That's "the hitchhiker" part of it! Then we moved to a whizzer from guard, and branched off into a few submissions from this position.

• Collar Choke - If you have their right arm in a whizzer (using your left), reach through to grab their left lapel. Then use your right hand to grab the fabric on their right shoulder. Put your right forearm across the neck while pulling down on the left lapel.
• Triangle - If they block the collar choke, throw your right leg up over their head and put them into a triangle. You already have control of their right arm...
• Omoplata - If they wrap that right arm back around your thigh to protect against the triangle, then roll them right into an omoplata.

Rhet and I were playing around with these and asked Mel about the defense against the omoplata in this situation. He showed us that if you extend your right leg behind the opponent, then roll them back over your leg, you can escape from it. It works like a charm (as long as he hasn't got it deep enough to put your flat on your face and stomach). Found a video for this too (click here to watch - embedding was disabled by uploader)

Rolling overall was a blast. As I said before, rolling with Rhet is a lot of fun. Lately I've been watching a lot of Eddie Bravo (videos) stuff, so I've been messing around with some rubber guard. It's been a lot of fun to experiment with. I'm really excited to work it into my game as I get more experience. One thing I tried to work on last night was half guard. For some reason, I cannot seem to get that leg locked. It's so easy for my opponents to slip their leg out. I tried Eddie's Lockdown, but couldn't seem to get it to work either. Oh well, I'll play around with it more at the next practice.

Until next time... :-)