February 4th 2010

Review

Closed guard

Arm bar from closed guard

Concepts

Breaking posture vs. maintaining posture

Lazy guard vs. active guard

We had a fairly small group today which provided an opportunity to recap on the basic arm bar from closed guard.  As the gym was cold we did a slightly longer warm up which included some really good hip movement drills and flow rolling.  Flow rolling is essentially rolling very lightly at around 40% whilst allowing you to cover all areas of your game both offensively and defensively.  It's a great way to 'see' things that you can easily miss during a more competitive roll.

When working the arm bar this time we paid a lot more attention to the breaking of your opponent's posture and bringing your him/her into the danger zone i.e. the area above your own belt.  This allows you to control your opponent and establish a dominant position before attempting a submission.  A high active guard proved to be essential in achieving this as did grip fighting to establish a dominant hand position.  Likewise, we also ensured the person in the guard maintained their own posture, staying away from the danger zone and ensuring that they avoided submission attempts thus putting themselves in a position where they could break the guard and pass. Here the emphasis was placed on building a strong base and grip fighting to deny your opponent dominant hand position whilst establishing your own.  To pressure test and really cement this we did 20 minutes of positional sparring.  The session ended with some 20 minutes of regular sparring but we made sure we utilised the concepts we had just practised.