Here’s a nice post from Slidey about passing spider guard.  One of these techniques is very similar to the step-over pass to side control discussed in my post about butterfly passes.  Slidey’s post is really useful to me because I’ve found myself stretched out in spider guard a lot over the past month.  Usually I’m on my knees from trying to pass but I think I can still do all of these passes by either scrambling or hopping to my feet with hip-drive.

I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia visiting with my parents who are in the U.S. for a short while.  I’m sort of stranded in the woods so I won’t be able to train this week.  Instead  I’ve been doing some bodyweight exercises.  I’ve been trying to do pistols (one-legged squats) but I still can’t get down all the way.  I can squat down onto a step or a box and get back up by rocking but technically that’s cheating.  Last year I saw a guy doing pistols with a 53 pound kettlebell!  What a freak.

Today all of the gang at Hollywood BJJ got together to watch UFC 80. UFC parties are something of a tradition at Hollywood BJJ. It’s great fun. We all chow on pizza and people bring their friends and significant others. It’s a rare opportunity to hang with your teammates in a social setting.

Anyway, I was pretty stoked for the BJ Penn/Joe Stevenson match and as I expected, it was incredibly exciting. As I have mentioned before in this blog, I’m a big BJ Penn fan and he’s one of the main reasons I follow MMA. For a long time though I was just a couch-potato fan. I followed the BJJ and MMA scenes but I never got onto the mat myself.

That all changed about seven months ago when I had a personal epiphany. Oddly enough, the epiphany occurred at my day-job as a software engineer. My career had stalled and I was feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied. After many months of misery I realized that the source of my problems was my own lack of humility. I was so confident in my abilities as a software engineer that I was blind to my own deficiencies, and therefore was unable to develop. My career hadn’t stalled because forces had aligned against me, but because my own hubris was preventing me from growing as an engineer and as a human being.

Embracing humility opened a lot of doors for me. It allowed me to see all of the areas that I need to develop and to accept help from others. It allowed me to acknowledge that I can learn from other people and to actively seek their guidance. Last but not least, it allowed me to step onto the mat at Minnesota Martial Arts Academy as a 36 year old and start to roll with guys ten or fifteen years younger than me. As they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Nowadays I have a little mantra that I invoke many times a day.

Be humble. Have hustle.

I couldn’t help thinking of this during Penn’s post-fight interview when BJ said, “Sean Sherk, you’re dead!” I don’t know what to make of this comment. BJ has earned the right to be confident in his game. Nevertheless, dissing on your opponent smells bad and hides BJ’s true class. I’m forever a BJ Penn fan and I’ll always be inspired by his skill and tenacity. But as I develop my game I need to remind myself that my journey in BJJ began with humility and won’t progress without humility.

We’re continuing our mount drills at Hollywood BJJ and Shawn Williams had some great tips for how to get your leg flat when you’re setting up a mount escape. Before this class I knew enough to try to get my leg flat but I didn’t know the proper technique so I would just basically kick around with my feet until I got my leg flat. The problem with this is it takes too frickin long. You obviously want to start your escape quickly since you’re deprived of oxygen because of your opponent’s weight

Anyway, the context here is that you’re mounted and your opponent has his feet crossed behind your butt. What you want to do is attack the top foot but you can’t see what’s going on down there because your opponent’s body is in the way. So what you do is splay both your legs straight out so that they’re resting on top of your opponent’s ankles. One of your legs will feel higher than the other. That’s the leg that is resting on top of your opponent’s top ankle. So if your left leg feels higher, use your right foot to push your opponent’s foot to the side and hold it down if possible. Then rest your left leg on top of your right foot. When you remove your right foot, your left leg will just fall onto the mat. At that point you can begin your mount escape. The whole thing can be accomplished in less than a second which is much more efficient than what I’ve been doing.

The same technique can be applied when your legs are grapevined. You can defeat one grapevine by just straightening your leg until you can get it over your opponent’s hook. Then use it to hold down your opponent’s other foot and continue the technique as described above.

On a somewhat unrelated note I have concluded after today’s class that I suck ass at BJJ. Some guys in my class are incredibly smooth with very precise and technical transitions. I on the other hand roll like a beer keg with four Duraflame logs for limbs. It’s hideous to behold. I just want to play the beautiful jiu-jitsu but it continuously eludes me.

Today we drilled the following flow:

Double Leg >>

<< Head and Arm Guillotine

Guillotine Counter >>

<< Butterfly Sweep

Hip Out >>

<< Danaher Choke

After class I was screwing around on YouTube and I saw a video for the D’Arce choke. I was all, “WTF! That’s the Danaher choke that I was just doing fifteen minutes ago!” I’m not sure who Danaher and D’Arce are but I think they ought to fight each other to see who gets to name the move.

Anyway, the Danaher/D’Arce choke is kind of advanced for me. What I really want to remember about today is the guillotine counter. I liked the counter Shawn Williams showed us because it doesn’t require you to hop over your opponent’s guard like you sometimes see. I’m not nimble enough to hop and the last time I tried I landed with my knee on my opponent’s ribs and practically killed the poor guy. So I don’t try that anymore as a courtesy to my partners.

So what you do is grab the choking wrist with your free hand using a monkey grip and pull your elbow down to your waist while looking up. Then you stabilize on your other leg while driving your shoulder downward into your opponent’s sternum. It’s important to get your opponent’s back flat because it makes it harder for him to keep his hands clasped. Also, if you stabilize on your knee, you’re vulnerable to a butterfly sweep. Or you’ll just lose your balance and flop over on your side like I did about thirty times.