The Axl Rose

So I finally got a chance to work on some of these new theories with DS. As it went with GC I realized that there’s more work to be done. The stationary bike techniques didn’t seem to work mainly because he pinned my feet to the ground instead of pinning my knees.

Now normally when someone pins my ankles, the reaction is to arm drag them. But as he always does DS makes me painfully aware of the holes in my theories. I’m seeing two mistakes I’m making with this.

One is that I’m attempting to arm drag first and move my ankle second. The problem with this is it may work once or twice but a good wrestler will soon figure this out and simply let the arm drag pull them around and flop right into side mount.

Thinking about it, the second problem ties into the first. The second problem is that trying to move in a linear motion doesn’t work in this angle because his pin position is like a decline bench press with his arms locked out and hands in line with his chest or slightly lower. Even if I could move my legs, it’s not going to change his ability to pin much, if at all because it doesn’t get his hands above his shoulders (in line with his head).

Now if it’s the knees that are pinned down it’s a different story as his hands are probably in line with his shoulder, so if I move back his hands are in line with his head or higher, which is the “ab wheel” concept I’ve been writing about lately. But again, DS was pinning my feet firmly into the mat, so this was not the case here.

It took a while to make progress, as DS was nice enough to let me hit the “rewind button” over and over. I tried various things but everything I worked on felt like a gimmick that might work occasionally but once he caught on, it was back to step one.

After about 10 minutes, DS figured out what I think is the best answer. It started with the idea of opening my knees, which made his pin unstable. It made his elbows flare out a little and prevented him from being able to focus his weight down. This was a good first step and I think this could be a way to work in the arm drag, but we wanted some other options as well.

Again DS had the idea that if I opened my knees, then “swam” my legs side to side this would throw the whole pin out of whack. We realized that this looked like the leg movement of a certain 80’s powerhouse lead singer and thus we will now call this “The Axl Rose”.

It took about half an hour for us to reach this conclusion and after doing some “Sweet Child O’ Mine”ing for a few more minutes, we concluded it works in that situation. I could reestablish some handles and work my open guard from there.

There’s still a lot more to figure out and I’m anxious to work on the arm drag components, keeping in mind destabilizing his base, having my head on the side that I want to drag to, timing the pull of the arms, the push of the legs and shifting my hips out and towards him. It’s a move I’ve worked on a lot and got fairly effective with to a certain point but now it’s time to take that to the next level.

DS is an amazing asset and continues to be my kryptonite in every way on the mat. But since he’s so eager to learn (and somehow fooled into thinking I know something ;)) he’s a great training partner because we can figure out why one particular step doesn’t work and isolate it out until we find an answer.

For a long time I would have just worked on a scramble or just told myself not to get there in the first place, but now I want real answers that I can duplicate and more importantly, that I can teach to people that don’t involve the answer of just “moving quickly.”