Friday Morning

Today was a dose of double-under passes. The typically stack and stretch their groin from here to infinity. Other option is to turtle them up and take the back, or turtle them up and dive under for side-control as they try to regain guard. Or, if they are blocking your knees, pull up on the arm and slide in for an arm-bar. The last one was a little dicey, but an interesting approach.

Drilled with Antone and Nate. It never fails to amaze me how easy it is to screw up a simple thing like a three person drill rotation. Good at jiu jitsu, bad at math. 

Rolls with Nate, Jason (b), Tyrone and Ryan. The downside of rolling with Nate first is that he isn't tired out yet. I tried to initiate more passes instead of going right to guard. I worked and worked and couldn't quite get past his guard. We reversed positions at some point and he was able to get past my guard, but I regained. It was more of a chess match than usual. Good roll.

Jason (b) didn't completely demolish me, but he came close. I took a risk when he was setting up for a gi d'arce from KOB and tried to get underneath him. It almost got me arm-barred and then triangled, but I was able to finish the escape and get to a neutral position. I had zero luck passing his guard. James commented midway through that I was leaning forward during my standing guard pass instead of keeping my posture up.

I didn't want to submit Tyrone, but he keeps breaking the both-arms-in-or-both-arms-out rule so I couldn't help but triangle him. I did let him work mount escapes, and generally did a lot of open guard.

First time I've rolled with Ryan. He's very new, only a couple of classes in. He tried the move of the day with the double-unders, and I trapped his arms and collar choked him for his troubles. I'm such a jerk. I should have let him complete the pass, or at least get further through it. After that I did catch and release, and again worked a lot of open guard. After class he asked me about defending the collar choke, and I obliged by teaching him about how to break a deep collar grip and to never, ever let someone have that grip.