Hello, World!

Before you read any further let's make one thing clear: I am a white belt. Though I have a few years no-gi grappling, I am complete beginner in the world of Gi.  The gi was put on for the first time about a year ago. However, our gym did not start training in the gi on a constant basis until last September.   There will likely be some poor advice and thoughts on this blog. It will probably be good fun to come back and read this in a few years.

With that out of the way I am looking forward to working on this blog. This will exist as a place where I will discuss the things techniques and guards I am working on, techniques or styles that I struggle against, and a look at my overall physical shape.

This blog is more geared toward tracking the progress of learning and creating a record of my thoughts. Throughout my academic career learning has been more efficient when I am able to read about and then try/practice what I read about. For example, when it comes to making an argument before a judge it is easier for me to read about strategies and then try it as opposed to some who see others do it and then attempt it themselves. Tired of reading about learning styles? Good. Because I am tired of writing, badly, about them.

I am currently learning under a 2 stripe purple belt. Our school has both a brown and black belt (plus another black belt affiliated with our school about an hour away). However, the black belt is our head trainer and dedicates most of his time to training our pro fighters and rarely has time to teach the class that fits my schedule. Even then, I try to make it up to our "other" black belt's school once or twice a month.

While other white belts may think we/I am missing out because we do not have a Black Belt for every class I disagree.  At this point in my career a purple belt holds more knowledge than I can hope to learn in the next few years. It will be quite some time until the purple belt instructor is unable to teach me something. At this point he can show me the basics and be more than adequate in helping me improve.

The one problem, thus far, in training deals with the level training partners. At class, outside of when we visit our other black belt, we are lucky to have another colored belt outside of our instructor. Occasionally, we have a blue or two show up but for the most part it is all white belts. The average class has between 5-10 participants.

It should be obvious that due to the low amount of people in class we often roll with the same people all week. There are 4 people, including myself, who show up every night and make all the "outside of class" rolling sessions. You can bet we all know each others games and go to maneuvers. Is this good? bad? I am unsure but it makes for both some stale rolls but other times some interesting rolls.

Outside of seeing the same people each and every day the lack of colored belts can allow me to be sloppy. Some of the other white belts, who have wrestled in the past or have trained no-gi for some time, are good competition and make me pay for mistakes. However, we have a large wealth of white belts that are either unathletic or very new. It is rare that you pay for mistakes. I hit sweeps that are not set up very well or retain guard because of poor guard passes. However, this is not all bad. I often use these rolls to try new techniques out or to work on escaping bad positions.

Let's move to the fun stuff: What I am working on. For the most part I am focusing on my bottom game. At one level my body is forcing me to focus on the bottom game. In college, 6-7 years ago I dislocated my shoulder. Currently, the shoulder is very unstable. I have attempted physical therapy on the shoulder but it was unable to fix the issue. The shoulder will require surgery. However, it only tends to be a problem when I play top game. The shoulder "subluxes" when it is put at certain angles. Most of those angles come up when trying to pass guards.

When talking about what I am working on I break it down into a few areas. First the major "area" this can be a certain guard, position,  or transition. Inside of that I focus on major "concepts" for that area. For example when talking about butterfly guard a major concept is "staying off your back" and "wrestling from your butt".  The final area is "small details". Following the butterfly guard a small concept for "wrestling from your butt" is head pressure.  Included with this area can be a single technique like a hook sweep. A technique can be broken down just like a guard w/ subareas of concepts and small details.

My major guard focus is butterfly guard. I have been blessed with long legs and decent flexibility. The concept I am working on at the moment is wrestling from my butt. Back when I started in no-gi I thought that butterfly guard was something you played off your back. After speaking with my instructor and watching the Dynamic Guard DVD by Stephan Kesting I have discovered a major mistake. Right now I am trying to use a small techniques such as small head pressure to help me stay off my back. For the most part I am trying to keep my head under the head of my opponent. If I can establish this it is much easier to establish underhooks or establish a good position to hit a hook sweep.

I am also working on the "big concept" of linking together techniques. I have always known it is better to use one technique to set up others but have always been very focused on one technique while rolling. This past week I was struggling to hit a hook sweep against any of the higher belts. One of the belts pulled me aside and told me I have a great hook sweep but I don't set it up. While I can sweep the white belts w/ that hook sweep w/o using other techniques to set it up that won't work against colored. I need to threaten other sweeps/subs/scrambles to get their mind off the hook sweep. He said you can have the worlds greatest hook sweep but it is easy to "sit on it" and avoid positions that make it easy to hit.

Therefore, I am trying to use more arm drags and reverse sweeps. If I can threaten to take my opponent backwards or to take their back they will be "distracted" from the hook sweep.

In the next post I talk about working on escapes and why they fail against higher belts and my infatuation with the De La Riva guard.