More fancy armbars and some take downs

For Thursday evening, we worked a couple take downs for the beginning of class. We did a standard single leg and then we worked one from behind.

1. Grab opp waist
2. Drop down on one knee, sliding grips down to opp thighs
3. Slide your arm and head underneath their legs as you drive your knee towards their ankle
4. Grab and pull down the same leg that you are sweeping
5. Come up with their leg into side control, etc.

The next thing we did was another fancy arm bar. I wish I knew the name of it so I could post a video but I will try my best to describe it. Starting with your opp in turtle positon and your hooks in...

1. Drop one knee and leave the opposite hook in
2. Wrap around your opp arm from their shoulder in and wrap your other arm around the inside of their leg
3. Tuck your head and roll underneath your opponent, extending your free leg to aid in the flip
4. Bring your leg around their head as opp is flipped over so you can take the usual arm bar

I rolled afterwards with Brittany. She has me constantly defending, even if I'm on top. It makes it extremely difficult to try to work out of her guard. She always gets good grips on me so I need to work on evading those and bettering mine. She always pulls guard a lot in the beginning, which is what I'm used to. I tried to dominating and attempting to gain side mount but I was unsuccessful. She's fast and strong. I'm not even sure what I need to work on more in order to gain the upper hand on her. I need to lift more! I'm going to focus on gaining more control from now on. I find myself defending a lot because most of the people I roll with are bigger/stronger than me. I'll update after noon class today.

Passing the guard

Both the noon class and the evening class covered passing the guard. It was great because 1) I really need to work on this as it is one of my weak points 2) it was taught by two different instructors so not only did I learn a few different ways to do it, I learned vastly different techniques.

The first one was taught by Scott after we did some yoga to open our hips up. It began similar to the elbow drive but isn't of just pushing with our elbows, we posted one leg out and broke the guard by semi-standing.

1. Grab their belt, ready to drive the elbows down
2. Post out far from the opp on one leg, quickly switch the legs so the post is down and the other is up over opp knee
3. Keep toes hooked around opp calf while holding their leg down
4. Hook the opposite leg and push over to keep control as you slide the free leg through, gaining side control

We worked the same one for pretty much the entire class.

In the evening, we focused on the completely standing up break.

1. One hand on the belt, one controlling the sleeve
2. Stand and thrust forward to break open the guard
3. Grab the opp legs and throw them over to one side to gain side control

We also did closed guard to butterfly guard pass.

So you do the standing break, the opp switches to butterfly guard and you immediately sit down. Simply slide your right knee to their right leg and sprawl to pass their butterfly guard to side control.

Overall, it was a pretty constructive day for me. I didn't stay to roll afterwards though which I am feeling a little guilty about since I can't go to class today. However, I will be going to work out again.

I have been looking through Submission Grappling by Royler Gracie so hopefully that will aid me in passing the closed guard. I've also watched about 10 minutes of Demian Maia Science of BJJ.