Several times a year, I sit down and ask myself a series of questions to evaluate where I currently stand.

This gives me a chance to thoroughly examine my skills, recognize my strong points and highlight weaknesses that need to be addressed.

It also gives me a way of comparing how far I’ve progressed since the last time I’ve done an evaluation, which can be nice. If you do this as a white belt and then as a blue belt, you might surprise yourself at how much you’ve learned.

Most of my questions…

Leo and John have some new insight into and a slick sweep that build on the game taught to them by Robson Moura.

From Leo:

I watched my instructor, Edson Diniz, play this game last night. I didn’t even know that he could.

I’ve seen and been taught many ways of controlling the opponent while going for an omoplata. The most common I see is to grab the belt. Depending on the setup, some have you hug the knee/thigh to your shoulder. Eddie teaches the jiu-claw, hugging behind both thighs.

They’ve all worked okay for me, but lately I’ve been doing this, after seeing my instructor do it a lot and having him show it to me:

I am grabbing the end of the pant leg and straightening my arm to stretch it up and…

I reviewed the armbar instructional by John Will and David Meyer over on Lockflow. Check it out »

Over on the Straight Blast Gym forum, Mike Sweeney was asking Leo Kirby about the “Marceloplata”, the way Marcelo Garcia finishes the omoplata. Leo shot footage of how it was taught to him. Since I’ve got several requests for this, I’m putting it up in the journal.

From guard, it’s a strong way to counter when they grab your bottom leg to stop you from spinning out for the normal omoplata.

From the mount, it’s just awesomeness.

From guard

From mount

Marcelo teaches this in much greater detail on his third set.

Better yet, Marcelo is doing an…

As the new year approached, I made a list of resolutions for my jiu-jitsu training with “Get better at no-gi” and “Beef up my no-gi chokes” at the top. This has been changing the direction of my training, which you’ll see in later articles and tutorials.

I was fortunate enough to talk to Jeff Rockwell about my new goals. It turns out his main game revolves around no-gi chokes. After some badgering, he went out of his way to film a tutorial of them for me, and he’s happy for me…