tallgeese

I would guess that's accurate. If he's getting the sweep even after failing to properly position the hips he is certainly throwing it with muscle. I'm betting that's the most accurate diagnosis.

2/11 Drilled north/ south position and breaking grips. Attacked with papercutter choke followed by arm bar. 40 min free roll. PTK drilled knife bridging and etchi keti and sune keti from the 4 wall.

2/8 Ran a private with one of the purple belts. Focused on getting building form from bottom. 2/9 Drilled north/ south position and transitions. Hit kimura and armbar

There are some things you can do to build it, but take it slow and balance the physical learning you're going to be doing on the subject with the intellectual side as well. Read the thoughts of people who have done combat mindset for a living, internalize them and study them. The Book of Five Rings, The Hagakure, both come to mind immediatly as source material on the classic level. Consider modern sources as well. On Killing and On Combat by Grossman, Leadership and Training for the Fight but Howe, Warrior Mindset by Asken, Living the Martial Way by Morgan. All of these speak to the mental development of the warrior. Delve into them. On the physical side, a stair stepped approach to stress inoculation will be beneficial. You're already sparring, that's good. Now, put your self into spots that you CAN NOT retreat. Park against a wall. Now fight. You will only have lateral movement. This means that your distance will be predetermined. Once you're good here, move to a corner. Now you're tooth to tooth with the aggressor. You'll be forced to deal with it. Start light, progress. You'll quickly see that the true skill in martial arts is not defense. Defending in these two scenarios to the exclusion of aggressive offense will get you beat up. To win, you must attack. This will drive not only this concept home, but will develop the intrinsic ability to defend BY attacking while staying as protected as possible (this is pretty high level stuff at this point, but you'll get there.) The in your face fight will also breed aggression into your work. It simply is. It will teach you to dominate you're physiological responses and continue on despite them. Once these more stationary drills are familiar, add a component of distance control to your open floor sparring. Tie a foot to a partners. Leave about three feet of line between you. Spar. In addition to the aggression you're building AND putting it together with you're foot work, you' be working on some great, tight skill development here as well. Last, move into full on scenario based training. Start with being accosted from distance at the front. Then start making it harder, from odd angles, the rear. Now full ambush. This will teach you how important it is to aggressively fight thru the ambush. This will transfer. There are drills to expand on this last paragraph as well, but you've got plenty to work on there. Hope it was helpful.

This past week, we spent lots of time moving from side control to a position of greater advantage; knee in, full mount, and S mount. Then, we worked some similar attacks from those positions that tied in with last week. For our recap, we cover some transitional elements as well as one of my favorites, the baseball bat choke. There's a lot of fundamentals in here that are critical to the position, the transition, as well as multiple attacks. The other neat thing about this recap, is that a good friend stopped by from another school to roll and we got to do some compare and contrast within jiu jitsu and the same technique to highlight the diversity of the art and how that builds out of the fundamentals. It's a pretty good conversation and probably the most fun recap we've done to date. So, for your thoughts here it is: It's a bit longer than most, but I think there's some good discussion starters in there. Enjoy.

2/7 Weekly review of material. 60 min free roll.

2/5 Drilled punch block sequence. Move to spider guard, then sweep. 30 min free roll. 2/6 Drilled side mount to S Mount transition. Same side arm bar, far side omo, triangle. 45 min free roll

Congrats!

2/4 Drilled side to mount transition with pressure followed by leg thread method. Cross collar choke variant. 40 min free roll. PTK: Knife work, fluid slashing, thrusting, inverted grip flows. Bridging with the knife. Technical sparring.

2/2 Drilled side mount to knee in. Subbed with far side arm bar then baseball bat choke. 35 min free roll. PTK: drilled strike mechanics on 1 and 2. Drilled precision and circle. Moved into knife work building on the work with the stick.

Welcome aboard KF!

Excellent news! Congrats!

Great question! We actually ran this as well this week. I start by taking the transition out of it altogether. To teach the choke ground up I actually start by having the partners laying on their side, 90 degrees from the ground. Then, I have them feed the top hand into the underhook position and to the back. With this set up, the student doing the choke needn't worry about feeling the movement that leads to the choke, they only have to focus on the placement of the arms and the mechanics of the pressure. These two factors alone are complex enough when you start learning this choke. Some times, with new white belts with short time on, I'll even break down to just have them rep the arm placement alone first. Then add the actual finish the sub. Now, once students have these parts, we will add it into the transition from the escape effort.

Thanks, Bob! That means a lot!

This week we are back on track with our recap videos. We spent all week drilling top side attacks. Specifically, we focused on working off the underhooking escape movement from bottom side. Here is the effort: This is a really great moment for me since this is the first video we got to shoot in the new place. So, what options does everyone else use from here?

1/31 Reviewed the week's material. 60 min free roll.

1/30 Drilled side mount to D'Arce. D'Arce to kimura, kimura to arm bar for advanced students. 40 min free roll.

1/29 Drilled side mount control, shallow side to counter the underhook. Moved into papercutter choke and D'Arce set up. PTK- ran the multiple strike form, focusing on the off side. Worked the jab/takedown aspect into the flow. Distance sparring.

Sure. And I'm not bagging on any of it, just to be clear. Like I said, I really liked the video. And again, the origins are there. But you very well pointed out, they were doing grappling for a different reason. What we see now in grappling arts (speaking specifically to BJJ here) is highly specialized section of grappling. It's not what you see here, again, that's not good or bad, it's just a fact. And I'm not arguing the root is here, but what we're doing now is certainly not what they are doing. Positional control as I'm talking about is the applied pressure to an individual to isolate limbs and limit hip mobility. There's some force, counter force applied against the joints here, but no real isolation. Again, I'm not judging. If I had a weapon to stab a downed guy with I wouldn't worry about it either, but I go back to we're looking at the root vs. a specialized sub set of skills that have evolved. Things do change and become new.

I did like it, very cool stuff and certainly historical in nature. I was most fond of seeing the armored demonstration and the firearms portion. I agree, the root of judo and BJJ is somewhere in there. I think you see Aikido more prevalently. That said, it's the root. Both arts have moved forward from here. It's neither good nor bad, just the evolution of the art. While, very neat, and authentic I'm sure, you see a lack of positional control that is the hallmark of modern "self defense" jiu jitsu is lacking. Again, this is not a slam, it's just what it is. These things evolve. So while yes, I'll give you that the roots are here, there is plenty that's new in modern arts. Heck, even BJJ "new" compared to what we saw in the first generation of practitioners. That said, it was a really cool vid!

I agree. In the early days of the jiu jitsu influx into America, this was VERY true. We saw smaller people defeating larger opponents on a regular basis. Now, the jiu jitsu cat is out of the bag. Everyone is training at some level to deal with the ground. Wrestlers, who have an exceptional base for fighting from the ground, have learned to protect themselves from jiu jitsu. Thus the domination that we once saw is less pronounced. Now, big guys do jiu jitsu as well. When this happens, it creates a dangerous individual who can apply strength and athleticism across functional technique. Still, the art is designed on leverage, and when performed properly this can make a huge difference.

Both variations are excellent options. It's a trade off, with the knees out, you have higher levels of pressure. With the knees in, you have better isolation of the hips. Understanding that, you can apply each based on what you're opponent is doing. For shimpers, I always go knees tight. This limits the ability of these people to get their knees back in to recompose guard. For bridgers, I tend to go knees out to drop more weight and minimize the bridge. That said, it's largely a matter of preference and what you can make work given what you like to follow position up with. This again leads to a trade off. The knees back allow you many times to go two on one when you look to attack the far arm. But you're looking at giving up a potential move by the bottom man to north/ south position. This can relieve some of the pressure from the position. Each of these positions will offer pros and cons. Most people will end up moving between the two as needed.

12/26 So, I've been off a week while we've been finishing our new facility. Tonight marked our first night in our new gym! Drilled side mount fundamentals, maintaining side in the upper third of the body and finish with a transition to S mount. Finish with arm bar. PTK- multiple strike form. Integrate into flow. Focus on slash/ return portion.

We are pretty consistent on Monday and Wed. nights, with Monday being our biggest night reliably. This holds true in both the BJJ program and PTK. The big dump is Friday. We literally go to half as many on Friday. Saturday is only an AM class so we see a bit of an uptick, but we don't get back to Mon/Wed numbers, but it is better attended than Friday. I also attribute this to the beginning of the weekend. The young kids want to go out, older people are usually doing family things. I likewise don't fight it, or fret it. Anymore. When I first took over the program I really stressed it, then I realized all those people came back on Monday, if not Sat and no one was cancelling memberships.

This week we spent doing nothing but guard passes. Starting with breaks (focusing on standing breaks this time around) and running all the way thru spider guard, we pass a lot of guard configurations. This sequence is from our Monday night class where we spend time on fundamental movement. Here, we're using the combat base knee to pass the guard. This time, we move opposite the knee slide and look at two variations. Check it out: As always, comments and discussion welcome. What's the consensus here, knee slide, X pattern, or behind the leg, which has preference? Who likes what?