To start off this block we asked for a very simple task. Hold our training partner in side control for as long as we can. Our partners can do literally anything they want. They have no rules to follow. Any change of position resets the drill. So it really become an unwinnable situation for the top player. This can be incredibly frustrating but its important. I need my students to understand that sometimes we need to be able to slow things down and just control our opponents.

Game 1: So again, we break the class into pods of 4 students. The active player will remain on top and a new bottom player will come in every time the rep has ended. My goal for the students was maintain this position for 30 seconds, but if they could hold it for the entire 3 minutes then they should. No one was able to accomplish this goal. We found quickly that even maintaining control for 30 seconds was difficult.

Discussion: One thing that has always helped me with these games is establishing a scenario. It’s important to define the game, what is happening and why am I doing what im being asked to be doing. This typically is a tournament match scenario. In this case, top player has just passed guard, they are ahead on points and there are 30 seconds left in the match. They just need to hold on and they win. Bottom player desperately needs to either recover guard or get on top, again with only 30 seconds left in the match. This sense of urgency is very important. These games should be sprints.

Today I introduced a very simple but important idea. In almost every grappling scenario, if youre in control and winning you want to slow down the match. If you are losing you need to speed up the match. You’ll rarely sprint to a finish, just like you’ll rarely crawl your way back to safety. So once we have passed the guard the match should slow down to a crawl. I need absolute control from here until the finish. My opponent wants to create a scramble, even a small scramble in order to establish an escape. So learning to control is paramount.

After we finish our first round of pod work I brought the students in to discuss what was happening. Today they did a better job with question. Most of the input was dealing with frustration. They felt as though they needed to stay in the starting position and squeeze the life out of their opponent just to win the game. So we introduced the concept of surfing. Not surfing to new positions, but surfing to maintain side control. I can use my two shoulders and my two hips and blockades. These tools are used to counteract my opponents escape attempts. Shoulder pressure on the face, shoulder pressure on the chest, hip pressure on the inside shoulder and hip pressure on the inside hip all provide me with solutions to bottom players escape attempts. This allows me to change my pinning pressure without leaving side control. This was the extent of our lesson, just quick tips to help them solve some of the problems they were having in their games. Now it was time for round two.

Round two saw many improvements. It was great to see students making the changes necessary to increase their control time. I watched brand new students as well as color belts succeed. This will end up being a great class as we lead into Day 2