Aesopian’s Totally Awesome Journal

I have too many goals at the moment. Maybe one of them should be to have fewer goals.

Here’s the grand list:

– Improve my conditioning, endurance and strength. – Focus on generating momentum from my core and using my entire body in unison. – Train transitions instead of just static positions. – Train combinations instead of isolated techniques. – Be fully committed to my movements, transitions and techniques. – Drill the crazy scrambles until I can come out on top (literally or figuratively). – Work on my takedowns and wrestling skills. – Get a mean armdrag from standing, even left-handed. – Use the duck under and Russian 2-on-1 in combination with the armdrag. – Fight to come to my knees and stand up more, especially from under side control. – Make wrestling sit-outs instinctual. – Acquire better base and balance, especially while passing. – Develop supernaturally heavy hips for passing guard. – Build an aggressive guard passing game from standing and knees. – Improve my standing guard breaks from good posture and safety position (AKA stalling posture). – Make the Margarida my money pass. – Fight for underhooks more from everywhere. – Finally get a decent underhook-take-the-back half guard game. – Also work on the out-the-back-door deep half guard. – Refine my core game as I continue to expand it by incorporating new strategies, positions and techniques. – Revisit things I thought didn’t suit me before and see if they do now. – Spot bad habits and eliminate them. – Be aggressive. – Compete in the next Pan Ams.

I could think of a few more, and I’m always coming up with more, but that’s always true. So many spinning plates to keep up.

That’s awful lot of goals. There’s no way of working on them all at once without losing direction. Part of handling that will be consolidating them and seeing which ones fall under the same theme so I can address them collectively.

But I …

Back in the days of MMALibrary.com, Jeff Rockwell had put up a series of half guard sweeps. He taught starting from a sitting guard and diving in deep as a counter to combat base. I’ve used my internet sleuthing to recover them so I could add them to my notes here. I’m currently focusing on half guard and want to work on these.

It’s all Jeff below:

Sweep #1

I got the first of these from watching Shaolin Ribero and the last two from watching the Noguiera brothers in the last Pride. When you put them all together, it is a formidable series of sweeps and reversals, I’ve been having a lot of success with them recently. While the main place I’ve been applying them is vs. Combat Base (knee up inside guard), there are LOTS of places to aquire this position from, ie. escaping mount, escaping quarter mount, escaping backmount, etc.

Alright, here I am facing an opponent who has taken a “Combat Base” posture (knee up inside my guard), to defend against standard attacks. As you can see, I am sitting up, not laying flat on my back, and my right hand is on the ground for base. My left hand checks his shoulder to moniter his movement. In this picture, there is a lot of space between his knee and his butt for me to work with; however, even if there is only a few inches of space, I have still found this entry to work.

My right leg is going to shoot inside the space between his right leg and his butt. Sometimes I will momentarily grab his right leg with my left hand to hold it in place. Here I am starting to dive my right leg in between his right calf and …

I want to show how I’ve redefined the trigger position for myself and what this means to how I’m getting the choke.

For the longest time, I thought of the brabo as only being available when they underhooked me. This is how it’s taught from half guard and when they escape side control. So the trigger position I came up with was “they underhook, I whizzer”, but that didn’t seem complete to me. As I learned more and more setups from all kinds of positions, I kept looking for aspects of the choke that stay true regardless of the particular setup. They didn’t always need to underhook me. In fact, it’s even better when they don’t since then I can skip crossing their arm. So what am I really looking for?

Last week I got together to train with a friend. Normally I restrict myself to a few techniques, since I know I can go nuts and pull out a bunch of moves and have a lot of fun and learn nothing. But on a whim, I decided to run myself through an inventory of every brabo choke setup I know. Not to drill each one, but to refresh myself on all the ones I knew. To my surprise, rather than getting lost in techniques, I started consolidating my knowledge. The different setups started blending together and I saw how to take from one and apply it to another. The next day I was hitting brabos from all kinds of positions I normally never tried, since my arms were just finding the grips on their own.

When I sat down and thought about it, I realized my arm was automatically going for this trigger position:

My arm reaches through their armpit and grabs behind their neck. Them underhooking me is definitely one …

The next point to cover is how to deal with their underhooking arm.

Like in the triangle, you want to cross their arm. Also like the triangle, it’s not completely necessary, but it’s best form, the cleanest technique and makes for the smoothest finish. They can use that arm to create a little space (so their shoulder doesn’t squash into their neck), or they can do Jeff’s escape of throwing the elbow back and grabbing their leg and kicking out.

I’ll show how I prevent those escapes while adjusting the choke even deeper.

Here you see them trying to escape with an underhook, grabbing my leg as they come up for a takedown. The hand on my leg is my problem, so I’ve got to kill it somehow.

Sprawling

A simple and natural reaction is to sprawl like you would to defend a takedown. Throw your legs back and drop your hips to the floor. You may need to turn your hips from side to side and bounce a little to shake their arm off. Stay on your toes and drive in to put pressure on their triceps with your chest to help crush their arm and prevent them from reaching up (and maintaining their grip).

You can finish from the sprawl too, but I’ve found you’re more likely to just crush their neck without choking them. As you’ll see, there’s still more adjusting you can do for a cleaner choke, and other finishing positions give you better pressure for the blood choke.

Mule Kick

The problem I have with sprawling is that people can often hold on to my pants even with their arm stretched out. Or I’ll break their grip, but they get it again as I come back to my knees. This is why I prefer to do …

More notes from my brabo choke homework.

Thinking Like It’s a Triangle

This may seem obvious to you, but it took me a while think of the brabo as a triangle choke. Yeah, I knew literally that it’s an arm triangle—that’s not what I mean. I had a “just slap it on” attitude towards it, where I’d give up if I didn’t hit it in one shot, which isn’t how I think about the triangle choke with the legs. With that move, I know to be patient while I work towards my ultimate goal, fixing several points at once: maintaining position, breaking their posture, getting the correct angle, getting the proper contact with their neck, working to close the full figure-four, crossing their arm, etc. You have multiple simultaneous objectives, and which one you’re working on changes depending on its importance and how well they’re defending it.

Once I started looking at the brabo along similar lines, it started clicking more and my success rate with it has gone way up. The main points I fleshed out were 1) how to get the arm triangle tight using progressive grips, 2) how to cross their arm and 3) how to apply finishing pressure.

First, I want to go over the idea of using a series of grips to work towards tightening and closing the final choke.

I’m big on giving people credit if they gave me ideas or teach me. I didn’t come up with any of these grips, but I did collect them from scattered resources and put them together. If you’re been following my brabo choke homework, you know the usual suspects for my inspiration/plagarism, so I don’t feel like re-re-recrediting them again here. It gets tiring to have to keep citing sources, but it’s a habit since people go …

A recent ankle injury has caused me to change the focus of my game. The main areas I’m working on are standing from guard and snapping down to the front headlock then doing brabo chokes. I’ve also been working on the wrestler’s sit-out simply because it’s a skill I’ve never really developed and figured now would be a good time. Below are the drills I’ve been doing to train these skills.

Most of these are warm-ups and introduction stage drills. I’m putting together more that add resistance for the isolation stage. I’ve got a couple interesting ideas for how to create some intense but highly specific drills (like fighting to get back to your feet when they’re hugging both legs, either after a double leg or while passing guard). But this is what I put together for a quick training session so I didn’t make it too tiring.

Standing Up

When I started working on the guillotines, I watched a bunch of submission highlight reels (101 Submissions, Grappling All-Stars, youtube, etc.) to see how people set them up. One of the main ways I saw was standing up from guard. Which is only too obvious, since one of the main points of any guillotine is getting your head higher than their head.

I’ve also been giving standing up from guard a lot of thought lately for a couple more reasons. I’ve got an offer to teach women’s self defense, and this is what I feel would be one of the most important skills to teach. And unfortunately, I almost broke my ankle so playing guard hurts more than getting up and trying to run someone over.

The last and main reason is one I took from my own performance. I noticed that on the days when I feel more “on”, when my game is really …

From Jeff Rockwell:

Very simple, but very effective against an opponent who doesn’t frame his top arm properly when performing an elbow escape.

From Jeff Rockwell:

Escape from brabo choke in half guard and side control.

From Leo Kirby:

Jorge Vidal is one of the instructors at our gym. He is a De La Riva black belt and a great competitor. He recently lost in the Pan Ams to my other instructor, Edson Diniz, who went on to lose in the finals to Marcelo Garcia. It was pretty impressive to me that two friends and training partners competed against each other when you hear all of the stories about guys from the same gym avoiding each other in competition. They had a great match. Jorge gave Edson fits for most of the match with his half guard game until Edson caught him in a bow and arrow choke from behind near the end of the match.

Jorge has the best half guard of anyone I have ever wrestled. When I roll with Jorge I feel like I am constantly surfing, trying to keep my balance and avoid being swept. Jorge will roll you, sweep you, or take your back from half guard all of the time.

He was nice enough to let me film a couple of clips. The first clip shows how Jorge elevates your hips, keeps them elevated and then plays his game. I think this is the most important part of his half guard game: keeping the opponent’s hips elevated.

The second clip shows a back roll that Jorge gets all of the time. He will force your hand to the other side of his head, then do the back roll or come out to take your back. Once again, note how he elevates the opponent’s hips by gripping the pant leg and lifting it slightly before doing the roll….

It’s almost a curse word. It’s the worst part of class, next to warm-ups. You may wish you could skip it and get on to the fun stuff.

Yet drilling is a necessary and important aspect of learning, regardless of how loved it is. You’ve got to build muscle memory somehow.

The disdain for drilling likely comes from what it entails: repetition. To some, this might as well be a synonym for “boring”. And that’s what it is when you approach it as a chore, instead of a valuable tool for improving.

If you drill like a robot, you’ll no doubt find it dull. You’ve got to invest thought into the activity to truly benefit. While I can’t promise it’ll make drilling any more fun, I think I can give helpful advice on how to make it more meaningful.

These are the questions I ask myself when drilling to keep my mind active.

Hips Always

The hips are king. Practically every technique and skill in BJJ (or any sport or physical activity) is built around the hips. You can never go wrong by analyzing what your hips are doing.

You may be surprised to find how many moves come down to the hips. A collar choke or a guillotine may seem to be all in the arms, but the setups don’t work and real leverage doesn’t come until you know how and where to use your hips.

Examples

Is my hip movement smooth enough?
Is my hip placement correct?
Did I rotate my hips far enough?
Are my hips heavy enough?

Gross Motor Skills

Moving outwards from the core, you can look at the next largest elements of the technique: what are your limbs is doing?

Try paying attention to each limb individually, making sure it plays its role to the fullest. Look at them altogether and see if they’re working in sync. Tie this …