A quick armbar, and done for the holidays

Last night was a good night. I scored a lot of good moves and felt strong. This morning is a different story. I knew last night that my body hadn't fully recovered from the concert Saturday night, not to mention the previous weeks of hard training. This morning greeted me with the familiar full-body exhaustion that comes with BJJ/MMA training, but also I've now racked up enough small, irritating pains and injuries that it's uncomfortable to do most anything beyond sitting quietly in a chair. This includes a slight ankle sprain that I haven't let heal yet, both knees, a ring finger that has been jammed for a month, and the cut over the eye from the head butt at the Vandals show. A few years ago I would have kept training to be tough, now I know from experience that that's a stupid move. Everyone trains hurt. If you wait to be pain-free to train you'll train about once every week or two. But at a certain point you need to take a few weeks off and let everything heal up. I've found that most the time I take 2-3 weeks off to rest after training hard for a few months, I come back better for the rest, as opposed to worse for the time goofing off.

So, on to last night's groovyness.

Often in BJJ we end up on our backs in some type of transitionary position. Not quite a proper guard, but still with our legs between us and our opponent. A common occurrence in the gi is to be caught on your back while your opponent holds the pants on the inside of each of your knees, then flings your legs to one side and shoots past them, often immediately gaining side mount. The armbar we learned last night was something of a trap for that situation.

The setup is simple. Your opponent is kneeling in front of your open guard holding the inside of your knees, and he shoves one or both down to step over or around. The idea is to fight it a little, then let him shove one knee down (I'll assume your left knee for this post). That should straighten his right arm out as he then tries to either shove your right knee the same direction, or just step through your guard. You have a split second there for an armbar.

If his right arm is pretty straight, sit up a little and reach your left hand out and grab his right elbow, cupping the ball of his elbow in your palm. The idea is to not allow him to bend his arm or pull it out. So far I've found it helpful for my other hand to be grabbing his extended wrist to stabilize the arm and keep everything where I want it, but naturally Marcus didn't seem to need to do that. You want to pin his right wrist outside of your left bicep, with the palm facing up. This gives you the leverage to hyper-extend the elbow. To make things further suck for your opponent, keep his arm straightened out and his wrist stuck to your outer bicep while leaning back and rolling to the right. This puts additional pressure on the elbow joint. I asked Marcus if I could crush my way out of the lock by pushing forward aggressively, thus giving my arm the ability to bend. He pointed out that that was why he recommended that as we roll to our side we kick out his knee, planting him on his face. I had completely forgotten that step in the first few repetitions of practice.

But what if your opponent's arm isn't straight when he shoves your knee down? It's likely a good player will put his right elbow on the mat. Well, you can do two things to get a pretty straight arm.

1. Move your left knee backwards. If he holds on (which he almost certainly will since he fought to get that far) he might straighten his arm
2. If that doesn't work because he's wise to your shenanigans and moves forward with your leg, go for the other arm. There's a chance that if he's protecting the one arm he isn't paying as much attention to the other

This is a classic case of "simple but not easy." The move itself consists of very few steps, and though the details obviously must be correct for it to work, for BJJ it's not a very complicated technique. However I don't harbor any confidence in my ability to start snapping this on even new white belts right away. This move requires timing, presence of mind, and the ability to control an opponent's moves to the point that he attacks in exactly the manner you wish him to. None of this is easy.