Aesopian’s Totally Awesome Journal

My training partner Trog filmed a few of his best half guard sweeps.

Rocking sweep from deep half guard and brabo counter sweep.

Half guard versus standing: reverse and normal De la Riva, “footlock” guard, x-guard and Saulo’s sweep.

From each of these guards, you have a wide variety of sweeps. The important concept here is linking the guards together.

Hip movements for going underneath: backroll, swinging and pendulum.

Try drilling the leg and hip movements solo and with a partner to get a feel for them. You’ll find that when they resist one direction, they usually leave themselves open to the other.

The second part of the long distance and deep half guard videos.

Pass prevention: scissors, hugging, stacking and reverse scarf (Marcelo) pass counters. Backroll sweep.

A friend of mine asked me to film something on the half guard I’ve been working on. This turned into 30 minutes of footage that I’ve broken it down into 6 videos. I’ll be putting these up throughout the week. To start, here is the first one on the basics of the position and my [...]

Passing along seminar footage my e-friend Boyd shot. Here it is:

Attention white belts of the world: put down your copy of Mastering the Rubber Guard for about an hour and watch this video. I realize it may be hard to pull yourself away from all the bright colors and exotic nomenclature, but trust my judgment on this. What follows is a seminar I shot for my first BJJ instructor, Bryan Harper, recently promoted to black belt. He is very very good. In particular, he is very very good at passing the guard and choking people, which is great because I’ve included ten choking and passing techniques that I think will be extremely beneficial to your collective games. Best of all, they’re all tailor-made to be applicable to that most elusive of creatures: MMA-specific grappling techniques.

So check it out. This was my first time shooting a seminar, and yes, I’m well aware that the camera gets a little…dynamic at times. I was constantly fighting for a good angle without getting in front of the seminar attendees or losing audio, so sometimes I had to adjust at inopportune moments.

Attention colored belts and no-gi wrestlers: Same thing, but with a tone less smarmy and condescending, and more enthusiastic.

Also, question for anyone knowledgable in the field of video encoding: this was only my second time uploading to Youtube. I shot all of this on very, very expensive miniDV and exported it from Final Cut as MPEG4 files. On my computer it looks pristine. On Youtube it looks and sounds like everyone’s being attacked by a swarm of killer bees disguised as MPEG artifacts. Is there any way around this, or is this just Youtube’s stupid fault?

Click through to see all of the videos. »

This video builds on the last by using the same overhook grip from butterfly guard, but now it’s submissions (instead of sweeps).

Take the first technique from the last video (switching from half to butterfly guard) and add these submissions to the end and in effect you’ve almost got triangles, armlocks and omoplatas from half guard.
If [...]

While down at Leo’s gym, I taught him and his student Ralph a lesson that revolved around half guard and butterfly guard when they’ve got the underhook on you. Rather than struggling to get it back, we worked on what you can do while keeping the overhook.

Leo showed this move to me the first time we trained together and it stuck out, so I made sure to get it on film this time.

Simple but it works.

Got to train with Leo Kirby this Thanksgiving weekend. Took the camera along and filmed 25 minutes of techniques between the two of us.
Here’s the first of them. It showcases Leo’s unhealthy obsession with the omoplata.

I’m sure Leo will be around to talk about it in more detail, but one thing he kept telling me [...]