Double Turtle Guard Pull

I'm over my hissy fit from Monday. :p

Today was a dose of how to deal with turtle guard from the top position. How to get to side-control if they shoulder roll or if they sit to the guard. We also did getting into the crucifix position. A new one that I hadn't seen before involved turning toward their butt, getting a foot between their legs, pulling them on top of you and then either doing a banana split, calf crank, or taking the back. I did ok until the point where it became a big leg party. 

Rolls with Sol, James, Wayne and Jason (b). 

Sol and I slap hands, and I immediately drop to turtle. He gets me out of it and into side-control. We reset, slap hands and then we both drop to turtle guard, side-by-side. I wish someone had filmed it. I dropped to turtle on each reset, and was able to at least get to a guard most of the time. Once he got to a dominant side-control we'd reset. My guard work was decent.

James and I had the first fun roll that we've had in awhile (at least to me). He was doing some crazy leg stuff that I seemed to do ok at defending but I was ending up in odd positions. Most bad positions, but some of them were just weird. I successfully kept him from getting full back-mount a couple of times. He did get me with a wrist lock and something else that I don't remember. Might have been another wrist lock. We seemed to transition through just about every position there was. He tried the knee slice pass several times and I froze up trying to figure out which counter I wanted to use.

Wayne was a handful and got me with something that I don't remember. I tried like hell to pass his guard and maybe got past once, but he immediately escapes. Seemed like he was muscling a bit, but he was using frames to do it so was probably legit.

Jason (b) told me beforehand that he was going to look for the tornado sweep from half guard. As such, I tried to stay out of his half guard but I couldn't quite get there. He got a sweep (not the tornado) got on top and I think a shoulder-lock of some sort. Reset and he was so focused on what he wanted to do from half guard and wasn't framing that I was able to pass with relative ease. At some point I ended up on top and was looking for the kimura from reverse mount but couldn't finish it.

Overall, I was much happier with my performance than I was on Monday. I think I was a bit run down from four days of classes in row, with a private thrown in on top of it. Also just part of the natural ebb and flow of progress.

The team is competing this weekend so not only will I be teaching the Fundamentals class on Saturday but I'll be doing the noon class too. I think for the noon class I'll do the basic scissor sweep, reverse scissor and then a bunch of positional sparring.