Monday, June 6, 2011

Monday night BJJ with gi

I arrived at class a few minutes late, and by that time, everyone was doing the warm up rolling. I did my own warm up, and after a few minutes of that, we were called into observe the technical demonstrations. As a special treat, we were reviewing some often taken for granted fundamentals, as there is a BJJ tournament on this weekend.

First we worked on our basic scissors sweep, from guard. Step by step, the first thing you want to do is make sure that your main grip anchor is set up properly. You want to have an outside grip on their collar, with your hand deeply sunk in to the cavity created by the collar and the nape of the neck. Your other hand needs to be controlling their outside arm, hopefully creating a situation where it is impossible for them to post (support their weight, block movement) with that arm. Your legs start in open guard, and depending on the momentum of their forward drive, you may need to either hip escape first, or shrimp away to get a good leverage point for both your legs on their body. Opposite to their outside arm (that you are hopefully controlling) you should be sneaking your knee in to get a nice control point on their trunk. Your other leg, should be preventing them from shifting their base, usually a nice way to do this is to just pop your foot onto their knee, or right beside it. Now, without getting too comfortable in the one position,. because you really want the movement to be as dynamic as possible, you need to pull their body toward yourself, with the ideal goal of them 'falling' forward and attempting to post with the arm you are controlling, and at this time, create the leg sweeping action by literally chopping with the 'scissors' created by the position of your legs.

After the basic sweep, we started drilling a reversal to a stuffing of this sweep.
The sweep was stuffed by using the other (uncontrolled) arm, to brace against the knee, and thus prevent the shifting of the weight. In this situation, you wanted to two-on-one control the inside sleeve, and drive it across your body to the ground, where you can take the back with an over-reaching underhook. At this point, you simply need to roll backwards to take them into side control.

That's all the technical drilling we did, and spent the rest of the night (an hour) rolling.

It was boss.

More Later.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Workin hard to make a livin'

So, I've been busy recently, and unable to get to training as often as I'd like. But work has to come before training, in this world. This is what I've been working on:



This first one is the bottom floor. Concrete slab. We dug out ALOT of earth here. Very stable foundation.


This is from the second storey. In this photo from left to right: My brothers John and Ken, and on the right is the Builder that we work for, Andy.


Working on the second floor at the moment, we're standing on tru-deck (a composite wooden board commonly used in flooring) fastened to the 8 x 2 inch thick Joices.


This is the second floor again. The black plastic on the left is sealing the air cracks out of the blocked wall we have removed. This was a double-brick in heritage style, and removing the bricks on its own was a full days work for four people.


This large steel beam is at the outermost edge of the wall, which will be used in tandem as a support for the roof, and a mounting for a sliding glass door.

More soon.