One challenge that will continue to present itself is new students. I have to keep the classes progressing towards a blue belt while also making them easy enough for a day one student to understand. Last night was a reminder of that, as we had 2 new students. With mount escapes this can be fairly easy. Just about anyone can understand that being mounted is bad. So the introduction to the class is fairly straight forward. You start mounted, you end when you are no longer mounted. This is about as detailed as I want to get for the absolute beginners. But I still need to define the terms. So quickly I showed the group the starting and ending positions. I did briefly mention framing on the hips and made sure they understand that the goal is the same as our side control bottom block. They need to bring their knees to their chest. Ultimately that will always improve their position.

Game 1: This game picked up where our last game left off, from a reversed roll. The bottom player is the active grappler and will continue to escape mount for 3 minutes. The only way they end the rep is by improving their position. This can be side control or better. The top player will have the same tasks as last week. Top player can only take the back to end the rep. I wanted to encourage longer reps for this game so I will allow a few seconds for the top player to re-mount or attack before the rep ends. Bottom player must establish an improved position to end the rep.

Discussion: Overall a great game. And I actually had questions during the discussion portion. The first question was about the topside position, which is not our class focus but I still wanted to answer the question. He asked about securing the back position once he has started to get there. He was struggling with the control needed to secure the back before the bottom player escaped and ultimately won the game. This is actually a perfect question. This means the top player was actively hunting the back and the bottom player (the active player) was able to scramble to a topside position and win the rep, which is exactly what I wanted to happen. The question is also great because our next block will focus on getting to the back and securing the back. This means the flow of the curriculum is going exactly as I had hoped.

After answering the questions I wanted to provide a few tools to help the bottom player succeed. The first was understanding that, like the previous escapes, chaos will always begin the escape. It’s almost impossible to escape any position passively. We have to create a big movement, like an oompa to start the escape. When this big movement fails to get us all the way out we can then use that to build our escape. One way to do this is to swim for double unders. If we can get both of our arms under the top players legs then they have a very hard time maintaining mount. This will normally allow us to escape. The other direction is with a kipping escape, framing on the hips and creating elevation so that our knees can fit in between the top players legs, ultimately ending in butterfly guard (or simply by bottom player getting knees to chest).

Game 2: No changes to the format of game one, but I wanted to encourage the bottom player to end the rep by engaging their legs. So for this game the bottom player must establish half guard or better. This means they can no longer win by simply getting knees to chest. Any topside position also wins for bottom player. Top player has all the same goals, submit or take the back.

Conclusion: I’m seeing more and more colored belts in my classes, which is a great thing. The great thing about the pod format is that the upper belts can stay in a group of other advanced students, this allows them to get the most out of the practice and they are encouraged to use all of their Jiu Jitsu to win the reps. Another great side effect of this is the white belts are able to look over at the upper belts and see how they are solving the problems. They get to see what a higher level of grappling looks like. The class last night was about 40 students which meant it was incredibly difficult to watch every rep, but what I did see was great. Very few students were held in mount for a significant amount of time and the escapes looked very similar to traditional techniques. All signs that they are figuring it out on their own with very little interference from me.

Wednesday will be my last class for 3 weeks (Lea will be filling in for me) and we will tackle one last day of the mount position. Mount escapes day 2 will focus more on wrapping up the legs to secure half guard. I do think the smarter way to play the game is to have the focus be on getting to a topside position or to a full guard position, but there is value in the small escapes also