Does your game flow?

Wednesday class with Kevin.

After a light stretch to warm our muscles up for the forthcoming pain later, Kevin then proceeded to demonstrate and teach an escape and reversal technique from side control. This involves positioning your hands/arms across your opponent's hips and shoulders and pushing away at a 45 degree angle whilst shrimping out. The key action in this techique is the ability to get a deep underhook using your far arm and getting to your knees to provide base and leverage. From this position, grab opponent's knee (underhook side) using a monkey grip to establish your new position. After this, you could either check the farther knee with one hand to prevent him from basing or ankle pick the farthest ankle, as you drive your body forwards to attain side control position. A variation of this technique is to pop your head on the opposite side of your underhook and execute a single leg TD.

What I love about this particular class is that after being taught the technique, Kevin the proceeds to teach how to counter THAT technique. How cool is that?!

Basically, this entails applying enough force on the back of your opponent's head to pin it on the ground. Then snake your opposite armover and under his shoulder to grab your opposite wrist and cinch it close as tight as possible. This would naturally enable you to move towards your snaked arm and apply enough leverage to flip him over on his back, effectively transitioning to a side control position.

After some drilling on this technique, Kevin demonstrated leg triangle from bottom guard. Apparently, he taught this the other week but as I wasn't present then, I welcomed the chance to learn it  from him but from my partners who have practiced it before. Fortunately for myself and Big Steve, purple belt Steve was warming up beside us and gave us essential 1:1 tutoring regarding this. Massive props to him!

Sparring with Keith, Guy, and James. I have to ask Keith at some point to give me pointers on TDs from kneeling. His was definitely very effective. I'm also starting to survive longer against Keith, which I hope is a good one.

Interestingly  enough, as soon as I met up with Guy, he immediately told me that he had no submission skills. I told him, "Great! Neither have I!" That didn't prevent him from trying a couple out, though.;)

James and I agreed to do a light rolling, as we were both tired at this point. With light rolling, there is a deliberate consciousness of your actions and reactions to keep it at a light level - something that higher belts seem to do with ease and white belts seem to struggle with. I believe it has something to do with having a greater awareness of the techniques and your body's position in space in relation to your partner's. This enables you to just apply the requisite amount of force to either counter your partner's action or to establish a more dominant position. This is what I'd like to call FLOWING.