I had the day off, so I decided to go to the morning class instead of the evening on last night like I usual do. Different faces, cooler temps, but same good stuff.

We started some new things today. Maintaining the open guard. Ideally (most of the time anyways), when you have someone in your guard, you’d like it to be closed, to have your feet locked together behind them. That generally allows more control. In an open guard, and there are many types, your feet aren’t locked, so both you and your opponent have more freedom of movement. And with more freedom comes more flexibility and options.

I generally shy away from the open guard if I can. I’ve found that most of the time the extra movement that it allows…allows my opponents to pass and get into a good position on me. But now, I know a couple of ways of defeating their passes. It’s so simple, I should have thought of it, but it’s unintuitive. They body can’t turn any farther than the head can. Block the head…block the body. All this time when someone is passing me, I’m blocking their hip, their leg, or their knee, which is hopeless, because they have gravity, leverage, and muscle on their side. But by pressing on the head, it causes them to pause and gives me the leverage to square up so that we’re facing each other again, nullifying their pass attempt.

It was a good lesson. I overheated a little during our warm up, so I took it easy. Plus I was partnered up with Raymond, who’s very new, so my taking it easy was just about his speed anyways. We warmed up with take downs again…I’m getting alot better at the following foot sweep.

After class Rob wanted to roll, so we did a few times. I pulled guard, and he dove in and went right for his usual ezekiel choke…but I looked up how to defend it last week and did so. He was pretty surprised! He broke my guard, and started passing…and I shoved his head, started to square up, but I had an underhook, so I wrapped around and took his back instead. He defended pretty well, and turned into me before I could choke him. I swept him into a good scramble which led to me escaping his armbar attempt too. We called it a draw. Pretty good performance for me against him.

Raymond wanted to roll too, so we did. I pulled guard and worked some grip breaking and posture stuff, taking it easy. He passed to side control, and as I was hip escaping he jumped into mount. He started doing something weird, but I had his arm so I rolled out. We stopped there and I showed him a better way to maintain his mount and a couple of simple attacks. He’s stuck doing the morning classes so he can’t attend the fundamentals classes.

On my way to change, Brock Larson walked in. So after I changed, a few of us hung out and watch Brock and another guy train some no-gi/MMA stuff with Damian and Klint. Good stuff!