Tie Your Pants

9/19 - Downtown

I wasn't in the best of moods, but knew that class would be a good thing for me. Many times going to class when I'm not in a good mood is a recipe for disaster, but I managed the hell out of my expectations before class and it worked out for the best.

I asked James before class what we were going to work on today. His response: "I'm not sure...maybe mount...why, is there something you'd like to work on?" I've been baited into this trap before, where he asks me what I want to go over in class and then he does something completely different. But much like Charlie and the football, I cannot give up. So I said that I'd like to work on arm-bar defense from both inside the guard and from mount (or side-control or however your opponent got on top).

So what did we learn today? Mount. *sigh*

It took me several tries to get the techniques working, but I felt fairly comfortable with them.

Rolled with Dom, Kelly, Jimmy and Sol. Dom is about 12y/o, maybe younger (I'm terrible with ages). It was fun rolling with him, as it really, really made me focus on using very little strength. I let him work a lot of top positions and back-mount, and I wanted to give him a feel for all of the positions. He's a yellow belt, but has competed on several occasions and can move fairly well.

You had to do a penalty of 10 jumping jacks each time your opponent got you in mount. The penalty had to be paid after time was up. Neither Jimmy nor I got mount. I think most of our roll was in some weird 50/50 variation.

Kelly swept me pretty quickly and then worked the entire time to get mount. I didn't do the 3sec count, but I assumed that he had it at least once if not twice. He disagreed, but I did the jumping jacks anyway. Unfortunately, I didn't check to see if the cord was still tied on my pants before starting on the jumping jacks. Let me just say that compression shorts are the bomb.

Rolled with Sol after class. I worked hard to keep him from getting side-control, but he eventually did and gave me good top side-control pressure. He's one of the few guys that I roll with regularly that can make top side-control feel truly awful. I went for a baseball bat choke but didn't get it. At the end I combined an escape and arm-bar attempt. I'm not even sure how I ended up there, but it seemed legit.