February 8th 2010

Consolidation

Last nights session was all about drilling the techniques and concepts we worked on last week.  We did a standard warm up with a particular emphasis placed upon shoulder rolls.  This can be a tricky roll to master at first, but don't worry, we'll be this doing every session until everyone is competent so there'll be plenty of time to practice!

From there we recapped on breaking the posture vs. maintaining the posture in closed guard.  Sometimes it can be difficult to see the big picture in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu so we made sure that everyone was aware that to pull off the majority attacks from closed guard be it a sweep, choke or joint submission your opponent must be in your 'danger zone', i.e. the position above your belt line. (We realise that there are some notable exceptions here, for example the hip bump sweep can be executed when your opponent is in the process of posturing).  We also made everyone aware that  posturing when in the guard can effectively deny your opponent these attacking opportunities.  From there we did 15 minutes of positional sparring and also recapped on the arm bar.  It was great to see everyone focusing on breaking the posture and things as tight as possible before attempting the submission.  It was also great to see those in the closed guard maintaining their posture and denying the closed guard attacker the opportunity to apply a technique.

We then did 30 minutes of sparring, again paying a lot of attention to the concepts drilled in the over the last week.  A good class, the progression is already clear to see.