Saturday we had Gabriel Goulart come in and do a seminar on open and spider guard. Gabriel is a successful and talent black belt under Fabio Gurgel, and fellow Alliance teammate.

We had a pretty hellacious warmup. 10 jumping jacks and 10 bodyweight exercises per person…and we had 40-50 people easy.

The starting position for all of the techniques was a bit of a strange one. It’s the start of the double underhook pass…which would seem to be a bad spot to be in if you’re on the bottom, because you’re being set up to be passed, but we learned that you don’t have much to fear. If you have sleeve control, and can keep your hips heavy, he can’t pass.

From there, you can create space by moving one thigh up next to his head and pressing back, then circling your other foot over his head and onto his neck. Push, and then establish spider guard, with one foot on his hip and one on his bicep. That sequence was the base that we built the rest of the techniques upon.

From there, we did a sweep where you take your foot off his hip, pull on the same side sleeve to get him to step into you, and then release the sleeve and underhook the leg. Take your foot that is on the ground, and block his opposite knee. Push with both feet, stand up in base and you’ve swept.

We added a variation where either you can’t get your ground foot through, or he blocks it. You can snake your head though and then hook behind his knees with both feet, grab his belt and take his back. This is almost identical to the trick that Damian showed Bryant and I a while back.

If you release a sleeve and grab his collar instead, you can either pull on that collar and kick his hip out to sweep, or you can shoot your feet up for an omaplata from this base position too.

Pretty good stuff over all. We wrapped class up with a few 3 minute rounds of rolling, which included a round of Damian vs Gabriel.

I couldn’t forget my 531 press work, so I banged that out as well.