06/11

Turns out the slump is just a little ditch, not an official Plateau©. I’m having fun ad just need to focus a little more on what I’m doing.

There are a couple of competitions this month (of which I’m doing none, shame on me) so we’ll do less learning and more sparring. It started on Tuesday with a minor event that I shouldn’t be happy about, but meh.

On of my pet peeves in BJJ is people giving advices while rolling. I’m gratefull for advices afterwards, or even short hints, but please don’t lecture me on something during sparring time. Especially not on the sweep I just caught you with. We have two guys doing this and one of them has a very basic game and extensively uses his (enormous) strength. And he constantly lectures people. He got his blue belt a couple of weeks before I got mine so I still can’t tell him to shut the fuck up properly.

I don’t even roll with him anymore because it’s so boring. He plays passer but doesn’t actually tries to pass. Last time he just head-butted against my defensive frame for five straight minutes, on occasions muscling me back in position when I attempted to do something else.

But Tuesday, shit was different. We played king of the hill with competitors playing guard as the hill defenders. And has it happened, I was his second opponent. I kid you not, I sailed past his guard in under ten seconds. As I took side control, he tried to power-roll me over but wasn’t successfull. I got back in line without even sweating.

I know I shouldn’t even care about things like that, but what the hell.

18/11

Not much going on. NAGA Paris was this week-end and despite Kasper pressing me to attend, my wallet clearly told me to stay home. Between that in the French Eastern cup next sunday, we’ve been doing a lot of comp preparation lately. I won’t attend that one either as I will be in Paris. So it looks like I won’t attend many cometitions this year after all.

We just started normal lessons again, specifically half guard passes. The first pass was a regular knee-slice with lower knee grip. The second one is more a reverse DLR pass, where you grab the top legs pant and the collar with the left hand then step to face the guarder and put him on his back. From there, base out with the left leg, switch the hip to the other side thus lowering his leg and then backstep out of there before moving to a leg drag position. During this transition, your head drops in the middle of his chest, pining him. This whole second pass is actually simply countered by using a regular RDLR “grip”, ie having one hand acting as a counterhook. But I think we’ll see a counter to that soon.

27/11

Ok, I’m stagnating a little. Lately I’ve been relying way to much on what I know and didn’t get my ass kicked enough. I went back to my strength because of the competition preparations, but now that we’re out of it I need to get back to taking risks.

This week is another half guard pass, countering the RDLR grip. You hop back to loosen the grip, sidestep to the right like during th first pass we did and then throw your left knee in between his legs, like you normally would do it with the other knee during a leg drag. Meanwhile the right foot posts further away to stabilize.

From that point on there are a couple of options which connect to the previous passes:

Backsteping over the remaining leg and end up in a leg drag position, which is a real mix between the two first passes we saw. More floating, better stability.
Use your head to make his head turn to the wrong side and windshield wipe the remaining leg. Better pressure, a little less stable.
Longstep in the same direction as you just sidestepped, with tight control of the knee. This is pretty much the same thing than the second pass, except on the other side.

Not sure what I should work on. More stand up probably, Fred was quite harsh last time in telling me I don’t protect my legs at all, but he’s right. i really enjoy xguard but it’s sooo hard for me to get there, I only land it on beginners. Leglocks wouldn’t hurt but aside from Florian, people are so ignorant of it taht they tap out of fear. Maybe I can focus on that when I roll with Flo, he’ll destroy me but whatever.

Politics wise, Christian announced he’s leaving sometime in spring next year, Salah will take the academy over and we should be abble to get some changes rolling. looking pretty forward to that, althought in the meantime there have been some slight tensions and cringeworthy situations.