I had almost no success with the reverse omoplata, partly because I had a hard time isolating the arm, partly because people just don’t turtle too much around here. I’ll save it for another time.

On the other hand, 3-D Jiu-Jitsu has been a game changer.

3-D Jiu-Jitsu is a way of analyzing jiu-jitsu positions and techniques to find the commonalities between these compartments. If you freeze-frame a position and reorient it—turning it sideways, upside-down, propping it upright this way or laying it down that way—you can see that one seemingly isolated position is remarkably similar to another.

Marshall Carper covers 3 areas in his book: arm bars, arm drag and single leg. I already has a sound understanding of armbars but that helped me to focus on the 3-D philosophy more than on the actual technique while reading the first chapter. Arm drags I didn’t really know how to do them, and… now I do, they have become part of my game. They are simply raining from closed guard and they help me during stand-up as well. All credits due to 3-D Jiu-Jitsu.

I did skip the single leg because I had already tried to implement it in my game and it’s not working for me at this point. Now go read that book, it’s even free!