It’s been really nice to slow things down and teach techniques for a change. While I’ll still maintain games are the secret to truly understanding how to grapple; the technical side of things, once we have context, is an important piece of the puzzle. So last night we began class repeating the warmup drill from Monday. Grapplers are in a neutral half guard position, the goal is to achieve the outside underhook to end the rep. Both top and bottom players are working for the same goal. As we mentioned on Monday, this outside underhook is important for both players. The top needs it to pass, the bottom needs it as a pathway to the back. We ran this game in pairs without a timer and the groups worked for about 7 minutes.

Discussion: Solidifying the outside underhook is a challenge for both players, this will always be a tough battle. Once we add non linear actions to the game we will increase our success rate. So the bottom player should be looking at off balancing the top player. If the off balance is big enough the top player will be forced to post to stop the sweep, which in turn should open space for the outside underhook. From the top position the threat of passing, or added pressure, can sometimes open up the underhook. So attacking the game with these in mind should greatly increase the success rate.

Technique: Today I wanted to revisit the technique from Monday only from a topside position. The technique on Monday had us leaving our inside half guard leg in half guard while we used the outside underhook to climb to the back. Today we are doing something very similar. By introducing the Rau drag on the bottom arm we were able to win the underhook position on the inside arm. Meaning, if our opponent is framing on us in an attempt to gain elevation we can collapse that frame and work to capture a gift wrap position. From here we used the gift wrap in combination with a chair sit motion to move to the back.

The drilling went very well, with some great questions from the students. The more advanced grapplers understood immediately there were problems with this task. Which I loved, because this is a very unlikely situation. Getting to a gift wrap from a hip to hip half guard is very tough, not impossible, but very hard to force. The goal of today was more to hide concepts into techniques and less about having the technique be a literal translation. I wanted the students to see the back take from an opposite position from Monday. It’s really important to me that the students are able to see all situations from both top and bottom. Most of the time the functions of these positions work the same regardless of being on top or bottom. Yes, the gift wrap is a great position, the chair sit is a great technique and the Rau drag is an important tool, but using them in this combination is relatively difficult. So its on the students to break this down to those three core concepts and integrate them into their games.

Next week we will work back into a sparring style block. With the students returning to their pods and trying to implement the techniques they have learned. I think we will continue this pattern of 1 week heavy technique followed by 1 week of heavy sparring all with a focus on the back for the next 2 to 3 weeks.