Mediocrity

Tonight was not a great night for me. Jeremy covered some kimuras and whatnot, and I'll go into that later.

My first roll was with Rob, another white belt. This roll was frustrating because my guard passing blew. I didn't have base, my posture sucked, and I got reversed all over the place. I was going for my usual passing strategy, but somehow he was always killing it by overhooking my arm and sweeping to that side. It was frustrating as hell because I know what I was doing wrong in retrospect. In recent times I've become to kind with the knee slide pass. I'm afraid to put my weight down and put them on their side. Because I was languishing with my knee in the middle and not controlling the sleeve, I let him use the overhook to pull me over.

My guard retention was solid, although I had a really hard time breaking his frame. I need to remember to switch to grip breaks if my usual strategy of pushing from the outside and hipping doesn't work. While on that note, I didn't do a very good job of hipping away from the arm I was pushing either. The roll basically went such that I would hold closed guard and he would break and try to pass, usually with some degree of success before I retained it and we started over. At one point he was passing and setting up a knee crusher (despite me telling him about my knee injuries. Fucker.) and I felt some tension so I tapped to be on the safe side. At one point, I set up my spider overhook sweep, but he started to push my other knee out from under him, and I could not leverage the sweep. In retrospect, this was a golden opportunity to switch to the omoplata or to spin 360 into a triangle, however, since I was too committed to the sweep and had underhooked his leg completely, I was caught beneath him and unable to spin through the gap. I also didn't think to do it, which will put a preemptive stop to just about anything. Once again, I suffered from being too attached to my initial technique. I really need to get it into my head, the first move never works.

Next I rolled no gi with a big dude, and this round was nothing short of obnoxious. I began by working for an armdrag to the back since I really didn't want this dude on top of me, but once again I floundered and failed to move my hips, and instead just tugged on his arm for a bit before pulling closed guard. Once there, I was successful in crossing the arm, however, he worked very hard to control my other wrist, which made it impossible to work anything else. In retrospect, I realize that I should have used my body to pull my shoulder and arm away, as this would force him either to let go or lose his posture completely, which would have given me the space needed to take his back. I didn't do this, however, and instead fought fruitlessly for the leg, which I did eventually get, but I was still unable to sweep him. Then we went back to me playing butterfly, him trying to plant my feet, me kicking his hand off, rinse, repeat. Eventually he was frustrated by my guard and sat back for a footlock. It's nice to notice that my footlock counters, at least, are intact. I scooted through to halfguard, where I spent a few minutes laying on his face until I could pop my knee free and push through to quarter guard and lay on his face some more. End of round.

Finally, I rolled with Kenny who destroyed me. My takeaways from this roll were that my hip movement was off (again), I had completely abandoned my attempts to get better at pressure passing and instead regressed to "four lane highway" passing, and I need to stop looking down. Needless to say, I was not met with great success. I did have one good moment wherein I balanceball passed his x-guard. That felt good.

All in all, my takeaways from tonights class are as follows:
1) Move my hips more. A lot more. I caught myself being flat on my back a lot, and that is why my guard strategy failed. In order to bump the arm off, I need to be on my side. Move the hips. Move the hips. Move the hips.

2) When passing, lead with my hips, not my head. If I am going to pressure pass, I need to be much lower and straighter, and I need to focus super intently on creating angles and cutting the corner. If I am going to get good at pressure passing, I need to learn to keep my effing head up. I think part of the reason I'm struggling with this style of passing might be because I have atrocious hip/groin flexibility. The solution to that is simple, but will take a while.

3) If I notice that someone is starting to knee-in-ass pass, my focus ought to be on a) establishing de la riva or b) fighting the hand that is gripping the pant. I caught myself failing miserably in this regard tonight, and my guard was opened as a result.

4) Keep my head up. Up, not down. Up. Straighten my shoulders and stop hunching. There are times for wet blanket and beachballing, but top position is not one of them. Lead with the hips, not the head. Chest forward, back straight. It's counterintuitive that straightening out creates pressure since there's a strong instinct to want to be close to whatever it is your pushing on. A good way to look at it is to pretend there's a ceiling that I can push on to create downward pressure.

A big reason that I managed to phail tonight was because everyone was all about overhooks, and for whatever reason, that really intimidated me and shut my game down. Now, that I was getting overhooked and the fact that said overhooks were effective in stifling my game are both indicative of one very important mistake:

I was not compact with my elbows. If someone gets a tight underhook, you are leaning into them too much and also allowing yourself to get pulled to the wrong side. An overhook or a wizzer is pretty tricky to get unless your opponent reaches for you. This means that I must focus more on t-rexing.

An example is my roll with Rob. When I was passing by running my knee up the middle and underhooking, his overhook should not have done shit. With the cross knee pass, I want to be turning his body in the direction of my pass, which effectively nullifies his wizzer if he has it. Because he was able to turn away from the pass, he could use the overhook to kill my post and sweep me. Ergo, I was not pressuring effectively and killing his hip mobility.

As far as the meta is concerned, I think my big problem tonight was that I regressed to attaching some aspect of my identity to how I do on the mats. I've been doing a good job of focusing on right action this summer and as a result a lot of my rolling has been fantastic. Tonight, I got wrapped up in the pecking order and who should pass whose guard and all kinds of similar nonsense. I am not my jiu jitsu, and in order to focus on doing the right sequence of techniques at the right time, I need to leave everything except my jiu jitsu at the door.

At the end of the day, though, I have to keep in mind that this all isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. If the worst thing that happens to me is having a shitty night at jiu jitsu, I'm doing pretty well for myself :)