Competition result: 3rd place

Sacha — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 11:04:01 +0000

Vids here:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6FAF6E42E7C87800

This was my first real competition (my previous competitions were all the type where you come in third because there’s only 4 people competing…). I lost my first match, and won my next two, one by side choke and one by an advantage.

It was a great experience, and made me realize what I need to work on. Aparently working on my bottom game for the last 6 months paid off because I never got my guard passed and was never controlled in any position. But now I need to get better at guard passing, my top game needs some improvements ! I wasn’t so sure about doing this competition, but I’m glad I took the risk. The experience of seeing what does and doesn’t work when you’re under pressure is invaluable.

And you learn a lot about yourself too. For example I learnt that despite training judo and chinese wrestling for some time now, I’m still a BJJ guy at heart. Why ? When I’m in trouble I fall back on my butt…

Armbar from Turtle

Sacha — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:22:16 +0000

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=uZKxNiqu30U

Rafael Lovato Jr Highlight

Sacha — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:20:39 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJzxLCCgJ8M

Jiu Jitsu drills

Sacha — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:13:27 +0000

Fredson Paixao demonstrating some Jiu jitsu drills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adOueUoWS4Q

Youtube Video Resources

Sacha — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:48:17 +0000

Youtube is probably the best place for free grappling instructionals. If you know where to look, that is. Otherwise you might end up watching backyard grappling or maybe even worse…

Here are a few of my favorite youtube users’ homepage. By the way, those are ranked according to my own interests. For example SamboSteve’s vids are probably 5 star for someone who practices Sambo, but since I don’t, I only gave it 4 stars.

3 stars (good stuff)

Sha167 (me): not much here, except a few good Roy Harris instructionals on escaping from Full Mount.
LegendOfAndy: a lot of freestyle, folkstyle, and greco-roman wrestling highlights. Some good stuff there.
JeanRotondaro: vids from a seminar by Robson Moura students.
FighterFitness: a few good vids on the twister backmount (or back half guard)
XJitsu: a collection of various BJJ and grappling techniques.
CascadeRaft: Keith Owen (Pedro Sauer BB) vids.
Xkidmidnightx: only two vids, but they show a very unusual guard (the “goro guard”)
BJJtapes: 3 excerpts from Braulio Estima’s instructional
AllianceBJJ: a few cool techniques.
Tobystaley: a nice “locked guard” (meaning you never open your guard at all) sweep series
Jasculls: only gets 3 stars because he can do a muscle up and I can’t. A really good vid on closed guard attacks.

4 stars (great stuff!)

Sunliveorio: lots of fitness, standup and grappling tips by japanese fighters & athletes.
SamboSteve: probably the web’s most active (and best ?) sambo teacher.
CombatChaz: Lockflow.com‘s CombatChaz page.
Graugart: famous around the net for his helpful tips (like the 5 point system for top control).

5 stars (the best !!)

GracieAcademy: if I had to choose only one ressource, this would probably be it. Extremely detailed instructions.
Tokuiwaza: lots of vids of the latest judo and bjj fights.
Koiketto: the bests ADCC & BJJ fights always end up on his page
Ashwix: he doesn’t get 5 stars because he’s my friend, but because he’s done a huge amount of work to promote shuai jiao (chinese wrestling).

V.I.P. (famous people – or at least famous usernames)

Marcelo Monteiro (De La Riva black belt)
Demian Maia
BJ Penn
IFL
Stephan Kesting
Jordan Breen
Aesopian

Conditioning & Strength Training

Erikmfx: lots of swiss ball exercises and SBG conditioning vids.

Other

Mekugi: a ton of japanese jiu-jitsu vids.

I probably forgot a lot of people, so tell me your favorite places to look for vids in the comments (doesn’t have to be Youtube).

Instructionals

Sacha — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:52:50 +0000

For whatever reason, over the years I’ve ~~downloaded~~ bought a ridiculous number of instructionals. Of course I’ve watched maybe 50% and applied probably 10% of all this stuff. But my theory was that I might one day get stuck on a desert island with 50 bored passengers, a wrecked ship transporting judo mats, and my laptop, so you can never have too much instructional material.

One of my goals with this blog, apart from giving me another excuse not to work, is to catalog and review all of these instructionals, and see which ones are truly useful.

The first step to classify my instructionals is to define a few categories:

BJJ
Judo
No-Gi Grappling
MMA
Wrestling
Shuai Jiao
Other

The Inverted Spiderweb

Sacha — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:26:37 +0000

If you look at my diagram in the previous post, you might notice there’s a position called the “inverted spiderweb” (I’ve decided “inverted” sounds cooler than “reverse” after all).

This is a fancy name for a very common situation, as demonstrated here by Mike Swain:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Hmzv0Nssz4A

Basically Eddie Bravo’s Spiderweb position (the armbar position while controlling the near leg) but with the oponent still turtled. Sometimes you get the tap from the armbar right there, but often the oponent will grab his gi or his own hand and you’ll have to roll him and get to the normal spiderweb before you can tap him.

I decided to name the position because for me one of the keys to having a technical yet offensive game is to break down every step of a submission into its own position, and get good at controlling the oponent from there. I believe I would probably get more taps against newcomers if I went straight for submisions instead of controlling the position first, because since my control is far from perfect, it often gives peoples the time to defend the attack. But in the long run, I think this approach is the best.

Back to the inverted spiderweb. You can get to it from the turtle, but also from bottom half guard. For example watch the Minotauro vs Shogun fight (I think) to see Minotauro get a kimura grip from bottom half guard and try to climb his leg into Shogun’s armpit. Didn’t work though. Of course you can get to it from the full guard, and I get it a lot when oponents bump while extending their arm in the mount.

Jujitsu Flow Diagram V1

Sacha — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:16:49 +0000

This flowchat shows the current state of my jujitsu game. Not all of it – I wanted to keep the diagram clear and it’s not even finished yet. But it already made me think about a few things. First of all, some areas are more heavily populated than others. We can see that I have much more options from the back and the back mount than from side control top. I should probably work on my transitions and submissions from there.

Another interesting point is that since I didn’t want the diagram to get too crowded, I only added one arrow (transition) between each boxes. This forced me to think what was my best move to execute that transition. This highlighted one of my main problems: I love learning new moves so much that I often don’t have a solid base to fall back on. I’ll be wondering if I should try the new sweep we saw at the last class or that reversal from Saulo’s tape, and during that time my oponent got a deep collar grip and has started choking me (that’s usually the point where my ego kicks in and tells me it would’ve been different in no-gi). So from now on I’ll decide on one move, or two moves max to get me from one position to another.