Teaching. Sortof.

9/16 - Downtown

I figured that I'd be showing some of the techniques from the seminar, but wasn't prepared to be on the spot before warm-ups. The invitation wasn't quite to teach the class, but more like show-us-something-cool. I showed the spider guard pass, the half guard pass, the half guard sweep and the omoplatas. When I was demo'ing them I was thinking "Geez...these aren't that hard. Why was I struggling on Sat?". Not that I was doing them flawlessly during the demo, but that they weren't as complicated as they first seemed. I felt a little sheepish, as I was expecting to blow my coach away with something. Unrealistic expectation on my part. I had forgotten the single leg X guard pass in the beginning of class and showed him at the end. He seemed duly impressed with that. I hope that I didn't look like a total tool when I was demo'ing the techniques.

James stayed with the omoplata theme since that was the last technique that I showed before warm-ups. He showed his variations of the set-up, and then options if your opponent rolls. I realized that I've been doing a defense to the roll way wrong, which would explain why it hasn't been very successful for me. Culprit was confusing two (very) different scenarios. Oops. He showed us a particularly painful way to force the omoplata if you don't care about your opponent's shoulder health. Between that and practicing the crucifix, our shoulders got pummeled today.

First roll was with James, which was a rarity. We got into some 50/50 nonsense, omoplata, and I can't remember what else. One of the things that I love about rolling with him is that he'll give you time to think through your next move and start down the path before he squashes it.

Roll with Sarah, and I did pretty well. Took the back a couple of times and mostly stayed out of 50/50.

Roll with Joyce where I let her work different positions. I discovered that I have an awful habit of being more concerned about using my arms to control my opponent's legs when they are passing my guard instead of preventing the cross-face or fighting for underhooks.

Roll with Jason, who was dominant for most of the roll and got an arm-bar from side-control or mount. After ~4yrs of training, I still get confused as to which way to roll to escape the arm-bar. Hmpf.