Artemis BJJ (MYGYM Bristol), Can Sönmez, Bristol, UK - 13/11/2016
Today was the hardest I've trained for a while (though this is me, so still not especially hard ;D). There were only three of us today, so we took it in turns for about an hour to do some specific open guard sparring. On top, I was trying to add direction changes to my knee cut pass. That is difficult with Sam, as his knee shield is so good, but I think it helped. My main problem on the attempts to switch sides was that it takes quite a bit of energy. I also wasn't able to collapse down on the other side, something was still blocking (I think Sam's knee or foot?)
However, I did manage to drive through on the knee cut a couple of times, by locking down his legs and turning around the knee. The danger there is relying too much on basing with your same side hand. If you do that, then they just need to get control of that hand to turn your pass into their sweep. I didn't try pinning his hand to the mat on that side (like Adamson taught at the Globetrotter camp), that's something I should give a go next time.
On the bottom, I'm still trying the shin-on-shin, but I'm also still getting squished when I try that. I attempted to push into the other leg, but wasn't able to maintain much pressure. I'm not sure if I'm swivelling around their leg too much, or not enough. That's another area I shall play around with. I wanted to combine it with my previous sitting guard, looking to link the two. It certainly isn't there yet, but if I can finally force myself to get into a pattern of doing this regularly, I'll get there.
Spinning around behind the knee-cutting leg for a single leg is a good approach too, but once again, that takes lots of energy. I also found it got a bit stuffed if they could secure a strong grip on your sleeve and/or leg. I was using far too much strength, as I was knackered after an hour or so of that. Might not have even been an hour, perhaps just 40 minutes. So, slow down and flow more: it's something I don't have to do as much as I should, because I'm being lazy and not rolling enough with challenging sparring sparring. Injuries don't help. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment