Thursday, April 9, 2009

more problems to solve

Trained twice today. Really seeing that while the concepts of stationary bike and ab wheel are sound it’s now a matter of putting the together along with head position and structure and then really beginning to formulate a series of attacks from there. Right now it’s mainly been hook sweeps, guillotines and arm drags.

But now I’m realizing that there’s another whole range of attacks that need to be used. The most obvious is keeping feet on the hips, head dragging him and working toward omoplatas etc. My instructor told me a while back that some of the things I was working on were still based on speed or beating the guy to the punch. GC made this very obvious to me tonight and once again, my instructor shows me why he’s the teacher and I’m the hardheaded student.

Rolled with T in the afternoon and GC at night. GC especially made me realize that just being impressed with what I stumbled upon wouldn’t be enough as he was able to blow past the guard quickly until I started to use head placement and arm control more. But now the next focus, especially on higher-level guys is to have an arsenal of attacks.

I keep thinking of a bunch of cheesy analogies but the point remains that the control is getting better, but now it must be followed with the attack.

I felt a few times with GC that I established some good control, especially in sitting guard and I could feel him just hovering back. I knew the butterfly sweep wouldn’t work, but he wasn’t far back enough to push over either. I caught myself waiting and with that tornado, waiting leads to passing leads to scrambling leads to being exhausted and losing my technique. It will never be easy with someone like that but I wasn’t throwing up bumps in the road or good baits either. And more importantly if there’s no threat, he’ll figure out the maze and run through it.

With T it was similar as he studied my reactions and started control my head and working the pass from there. So while I think I’ve taken the first step in learning control in ways I’ve come to the same crossroads that I used to feel with the mount and other positions where I feel like I need to hold that position rather than working my way to even better control with better consequences, i.e. a submission.

The guard I’m working with has tons of submissions as my instructor has done them all to me☺

And while at one point playing tennis and hitting all the balls back was nice, it’s time to play football and be on offense. I imagine without that it’s still a countdown until I’m tapping with someone the larger or more talented people out there. Or it’s a scramble like it was tonight. But I don’t like scrambles because it’s a young man’s game and it means that I did something wrong or more specifically lost control.

The guard I have now is basically the open guard equivalent of holding the mount and grapevining the feet and hoping they leave their neck or just dangle their arm out. Now it needs to incorporate the control into attacks that are chained together more specifically. I’m looking forward to it as I think it’s still my weakest part of my game but somehow I think it could become a strength soon.

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