Above all else I want to make sure the pace of this curriculum is entertaining and effective. So this means we can’t spend enough time on a specific topic to become proficient, but we also need to spend enough time that the students have a basic grasp of the concepts. My goal was always to hide the important concepts within techniques, but as I’ve shifted to a more game based program we are spending more time working the concepts and less on learning the techniques. I’m still not sure what this means long term, but I think the students progress is better than with my previous groups. So that must mean something?

Monday we talked about spider guard, which I think is the perfect follow up to Collar Sleeve guard. I first wanted to remind the students of where we left off last week with collar sleeve on an edge. This position prompts our opponent to fight our bottom leg with their free hand. Which sets up spider guard perfectly.

Exploration: With a cooperative partner, start in collar sleeve and progress to spider guard. For this drill we will have one foot on the hip and the other foot on the bicep (single arm spider). Working together as a team explore how this control can produce reactions from the top player. Lots of movement and lots of communication back and forth changing top and bottom as you need.

Discussion: Any time we have our arms controlling our opponents upper body and our feet on the hip we will force one of two reactions.

the top player will have their feet away from us allowing us to hinge them at the hips forcing a head down posture

The top player will move their feet towards us, moving their hips towards our hips allowing them to have a head up posture.

Technique: This plays directly into our two techniques of the day.

When the top player is in a head down posture we should be able to angle ourselves in a way that forces weight over a trapped post, creating a spider guard sweep. We accomplished this by moving our guard position perpendicular to our opponent and kicking up with the foot that is on their bicep. This sweep ends up looking a lot like our granby rolls we do at the beginning of class.

When the top player moves their hips towards our hips and moves to a head up posture that opens up the option for a triangle. We simply point our toes on the bicep control and lock into our loose lock triangle.

90 percent of spider guard reactions look like this. Top player is either forced head down posture or head up posture. It’s important to see the options from both reactions.

Drilling: Working in pairs we played with this idea. Starting with cooperative drilling then progressing to reactionary drilling (top player chooses either head up or head down, guard player then must choose the correct technique)

Conclusion: This lesson is meant to show the connections between our upper body grips. Collar sleeve defense can lead to spider guard, but it can also lead to many other guard options, sweeps and submissions. As we learn more options we naturally improve our success rate because we have more ways to win. Everything should be building on the fundamental concepts.

Feet start on hips

We then connect our arms to either our opponents upper body or their lower body

Our opponent has two options head up feet in, or head down feet out.

Our guard is based on this very simple idea. Don’t over complicate things.