I'm on backup on-call duty this week, so I can't train again because I still need to be able to respond to work issues within about 10-15 minutes (if the primary on-call guy's phone dies or something I get the call). That and my finger is still splinted and mending. Next week I'll be back in the gym for conditioning and technique, but sparring will probably have to wait another two weeks. I really don't feel like re-injuring this stupid finger 90% of the way to healed. Especially since I want to move to primarily kickboxing for a little while and I can't make a fist right now.
So the guillotine. Last week I talked about Cesar Gracie's guillotine tips that help you apply it correctly. This week I want to examine the defense for the standing guillotine as demonstrated by (I think) Rener and Ryron Gracie over at the Gracie Academy in Torrance, CA.
Getting caught in a standing guillotine is pretty dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. Most people don't, and they'll in fact almost put themselves into a standing guillotine if you punch them a couple of times. Typically this comes via a football tackle attempt, I've seen it at parties and it's amusing. At any rate the point is the guillotine is so simple that someone might accidentally catch you with it. So, rather than get choked by some noob, try the Gracie techniques below.
The first thing pretty much everyone always advises in guillotine defense is to hook your hand on the wrist that's choking you (you'll know which one as it's handily attached to your throat) and pull. Obviously this is geared toward giving you room to breathe, but alone it's just a stalling technique to buy you time to get out. Staying there holding the wrist is lame, and you might end up getting choked anyway.
Since you're standing up, assuming you opponent is using his right arm to choke you, after you grab his right wrist with your left hand and start pulling, reach over his left shoulder with your right hand. If there's a gi or shirt grab it. Now move around to his left. This last part is another standard guillotine defense - move your body to the side opposite the choke. If my head is stuck under some dude's right armpit I want my hips to be on his left. As the Gracie brothers point out in the video, trying to go the wrong direction results in a NASTY neck crank.
So you've got a hand on his wrist, a hand over his shoulder, and you've walked around to his left. Great, now bang on the back of his knee to buckle him and bring him down, making sure to fall to his side. If you can't buckle him down, use your heel to smack the back of his leg near the ankle to start a takedown.
But how do you avoid the closed guard on the way down? The short answer is any way possible. That's not snide, it's an indication that a properly-applied guillotine couple with a closed guard is something to be feared. If you can get your hips past his then the guillotine is pretty much over and you're safe. The long answer in this case is to put your left hand on his inner right thigh, and your right hand on his outer left thigh as you're going down. This means exposing your neck on the way down, but it's critical to not get caught in the closed guard (and being choked out in half a second probably isn't going to happen). Once your hands are in place shove the legs to the side and jump to the other.
In the video Rener (I think) actually does almost a flip with his head still in the guillotine, but he's just twisting his head a little. I've done this before and there's very little strain. Even if you don't get completely clear, ending up in half-guard is about 10x better than landing in full guard, where you are almost guaranteed to get stretched out, cranked and choked.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The guillotine according to Cesar Gracie
I'm on-call this week (Friday morning to Friday morning) so I can't train. The on-call guy for our team is expected to be within about 10-15 minutes from logging in to a machine at work to start working in case there's a problem, and somehow that doesn't really jive with being called in the middle of a match. I can't spar with my torn finger tendon anyway so it's not that big a loss, I just go a little harder on the calisthenics and mix in some weights. It turns out that medicine ball workouts are great for finger injuries since you just wrap the fingers in a gentle curve and hold them there the whole time (minus throwing exercises).
At any rate the guillotine has been bugging me for a long time. Obviously it's a powerful move, and simple to apply at a generic level, meaning anyone can slap it on and get it if the other guy is dumb or not paying attention. But there are a few details that take this simplest of techniques to a whole new level of ass-kickery. So where does this tie into Cesar Gracie? Well, since I can't train I fired up his excellent BJJ DVD and started watching his no-gi guillotine section (DVD #3, 30 minutes in).
My beef with the guillotine is simple - I think that most the time we see it thrown it's not really a submission attempt as much as it is an attempt to make up for a poor takedown defense. Guys find themselves on the bad end of a double-leg and know they can't stop it so they reach down and try to get a forearm across a throat. The result is almost always the aggressor passing the guard to the side opposite that which his head is stuck and negating the crappy, desperate guillotine while sliding easily into a position that the bottom guy could have at least made him work to get if he wasn't trying to go for a sloppy guillotine. I guess that's a problem with the application of the technique rather than the technique itself.
But Cesar (rather than call him Gracie, which is ambiguous in BJJ conversations...) has two tricks for this. The first assumes you're paying attention, and that you want to stay on your feet (you can always go down later). As your opponent charges in you want to stop his momentum with your hands on his shoulders if possible. It's important to sprawl a little, but to get a standing guillotine you don't really want to sprawl on him entirely because there's a good chance he'll stumble or otherwise go down.
If you can stop his momentum, slide your forearm down the side of his neck (rather than a big, looping lasso of a movement) and cinch in the guillotine, while moving your hips under him a little. If you don't move your hips under him and he's tall you won't have the room to choke or crank him properly; you'll be yanking his neck on your tip-toes and he'll be fine. With your hips under him you change the angle. Now you pull up on his neck and you can actually get him to dangle his entire body weight from his neck alone, which even if it doesn't choke it hurts like a bitch.
The second trick Cesar demonstrated was for those times that you're just plain going down and want to grab the neck. You know, those scenarios I just complained about above. His technique changes the order of operations.
Cesar falls back on the ground without grabbing the neck at all, and immediately closes guard so his opponent can't just walk around to side control. From there to apply the guillotine he opens guard, puts his hands on the floor behind him to push himself up to a 90-degree sitting position, THEN he wraps the guillotine. After it's wrapped he closes guard and leans backward again. Now that's a choke. He also mentions that in case it doesn't land quite correctly you can't pull the head to the right (assuming you used your right arm to lock the guillotine). Now it's a painful crank.
This is a beautiful set of details because I so often see people trying to land a guillotine from closed guard. It's sure safe - you never opened guard so you didn't risk anything. But you can't get the correct angle with your forearm under the neck unless you open guard and sit up, so you're not just wasting your time, you're burning energy and arm strength with almost zero hope of submitting your opponent.
At any rate the guillotine has been bugging me for a long time. Obviously it's a powerful move, and simple to apply at a generic level, meaning anyone can slap it on and get it if the other guy is dumb or not paying attention. But there are a few details that take this simplest of techniques to a whole new level of ass-kickery. So where does this tie into Cesar Gracie? Well, since I can't train I fired up his excellent BJJ DVD and started watching his no-gi guillotine section (DVD #3, 30 minutes in).
My beef with the guillotine is simple - I think that most the time we see it thrown it's not really a submission attempt as much as it is an attempt to make up for a poor takedown defense. Guys find themselves on the bad end of a double-leg and know they can't stop it so they reach down and try to get a forearm across a throat. The result is almost always the aggressor passing the guard to the side opposite that which his head is stuck and negating the crappy, desperate guillotine while sliding easily into a position that the bottom guy could have at least made him work to get if he wasn't trying to go for a sloppy guillotine. I guess that's a problem with the application of the technique rather than the technique itself.
But Cesar (rather than call him Gracie, which is ambiguous in BJJ conversations...) has two tricks for this. The first assumes you're paying attention, and that you want to stay on your feet (you can always go down later). As your opponent charges in you want to stop his momentum with your hands on his shoulders if possible. It's important to sprawl a little, but to get a standing guillotine you don't really want to sprawl on him entirely because there's a good chance he'll stumble or otherwise go down.
If you can stop his momentum, slide your forearm down the side of his neck (rather than a big, looping lasso of a movement) and cinch in the guillotine, while moving your hips under him a little. If you don't move your hips under him and he's tall you won't have the room to choke or crank him properly; you'll be yanking his neck on your tip-toes and he'll be fine. With your hips under him you change the angle. Now you pull up on his neck and you can actually get him to dangle his entire body weight from his neck alone, which even if it doesn't choke it hurts like a bitch.
The second trick Cesar demonstrated was for those times that you're just plain going down and want to grab the neck. You know, those scenarios I just complained about above. His technique changes the order of operations.
Cesar falls back on the ground without grabbing the neck at all, and immediately closes guard so his opponent can't just walk around to side control. From there to apply the guillotine he opens guard, puts his hands on the floor behind him to push himself up to a 90-degree sitting position, THEN he wraps the guillotine. After it's wrapped he closes guard and leans backward again. Now that's a choke. He also mentions that in case it doesn't land quite correctly you can't pull the head to the right (assuming you used your right arm to lock the guillotine). Now it's a painful crank.
This is a beautiful set of details because I so often see people trying to land a guillotine from closed guard. It's sure safe - you never opened guard so you didn't risk anything. But you can't get the correct angle with your forearm under the neck unless you open guard and sit up, so you're not just wasting your time, you're burning energy and arm strength with almost zero hope of submitting your opponent.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Another lump, another triangle trick
I made my triumphant return to the gym Tuesday night, which naturally means I'm out for another few weeks.... My finger is the one thing that really didn't heal over the holiday break. I was hoping it would, but within the first 30 seconds of my first gi match Tuesday night I grabbed some guy's pant leg and he yanked his leg back - my finger pretty much exploded in pain. Wednesday I went to the doctor, and within about a minute of looking at the x-rays he told me I had torn the tendon.
The good news is there's no surgery needed, the bad news is twofold: I need to keep the finger in a splint for a few weeks so no training, and the finger will probably never be 100% again. Meh. So my knee recovery hits the 1-year mark in about a week, at which point I'll be wearing a splint on my hand.
Anyway I managed to learn a couple of cool new details Tuesday night before shit went ouch. There were only three students when class started so Marcus asked us if we had anything specific bothering us (more people showed up later, LA traffic makes this pretty routine). I had been trying to figure something out so I pounced.
I have long, thin legs and excellent flexibility. In other words I'm practically MADE to throw triangles. The problem is a lot of guys wait for triangle attempts and use them to pass by twisting their torso into into the triangle leg and flipping that leg over their head, passing into side control. This makes me hesitate to throw it.
So how to avoid this? I thought that maybe (assume I throw my right leg up and over my opponent's neck) if I hooked my left leg inside his right thigh I could avoid that pass because he would be dragging me in circles, getting nowhere. Technically that's right, but when I tried it before class with a partner I quickly realized that now my foot was stuck - I couldn't count in getting it out again which meant I would never be able to lock the triangle. Also, I had no power in the hooking leg; my opponent could easily push my left knee (which was horizontal) down and step over.
So my answer sucked, leading me to ask Marcus. He showed me two details. Neither was a super-clever silver bullet to stop someone from passing, but they sure helped.
The first tip was to clean up the technique. Specifically people can pass your triangle attempt when you fling a leg up and they're able to posture up and/or twist their torso. The answer is to not allow them to do either if possible, but definitely not both. To stop the posture, make sure the leg you shoot up leaves *no* room between the back of your knee and his neck, then form a strong L-shape and pull him down. Grabbing your own foot helps this.
Now he can't posture, but there's a good chance that if he twists his torso he can get out. Imagine you throw up your right leg. Before you can lock, he twists so his right shoulder comes back while his left shoulder stays in place. He's now removed a lot of the pressure on his neck and is in a good position to try and stack or pass. To stop the twist, squeeze you left knee as tight as you can against his right tricep or shoulder. Remember that you only need this to hold him for a second while you lock the triangle.
Ok, so either you lock the triangle or are about to, and he stacks you. Now what? If you don't react there's a good chance you're going to lose the pressure on his neck, and eventually your legs will pop open. The answer is ridiculously simple - walk backwards on your shoulder blades. As he comes forward on his knees you can outpace him while either locking the move or continuing to squeeze. There's a great chance he'll end up falling on his face with your triangle on his back, which actually sucked more than the normal triangle - it hurts the neck, back, everything really, just a really unpleasant feeling and you're still being choked. I haven't played with the move much but I suspect you can compound the effect by walking backwards to one side on your shoulder blades instead of just going straight back. I'll have to try it out.
The good news is there's no surgery needed, the bad news is twofold: I need to keep the finger in a splint for a few weeks so no training, and the finger will probably never be 100% again. Meh. So my knee recovery hits the 1-year mark in about a week, at which point I'll be wearing a splint on my hand.
Anyway I managed to learn a couple of cool new details Tuesday night before shit went ouch. There were only three students when class started so Marcus asked us if we had anything specific bothering us (more people showed up later, LA traffic makes this pretty routine). I had been trying to figure something out so I pounced.
I have long, thin legs and excellent flexibility. In other words I'm practically MADE to throw triangles. The problem is a lot of guys wait for triangle attempts and use them to pass by twisting their torso into into the triangle leg and flipping that leg over their head, passing into side control. This makes me hesitate to throw it.
So how to avoid this? I thought that maybe (assume I throw my right leg up and over my opponent's neck) if I hooked my left leg inside his right thigh I could avoid that pass because he would be dragging me in circles, getting nowhere. Technically that's right, but when I tried it before class with a partner I quickly realized that now my foot was stuck - I couldn't count in getting it out again which meant I would never be able to lock the triangle. Also, I had no power in the hooking leg; my opponent could easily push my left knee (which was horizontal) down and step over.
So my answer sucked, leading me to ask Marcus. He showed me two details. Neither was a super-clever silver bullet to stop someone from passing, but they sure helped.
The first tip was to clean up the technique. Specifically people can pass your triangle attempt when you fling a leg up and they're able to posture up and/or twist their torso. The answer is to not allow them to do either if possible, but definitely not both. To stop the posture, make sure the leg you shoot up leaves *no* room between the back of your knee and his neck, then form a strong L-shape and pull him down. Grabbing your own foot helps this.
Now he can't posture, but there's a good chance that if he twists his torso he can get out. Imagine you throw up your right leg. Before you can lock, he twists so his right shoulder comes back while his left shoulder stays in place. He's now removed a lot of the pressure on his neck and is in a good position to try and stack or pass. To stop the twist, squeeze you left knee as tight as you can against his right tricep or shoulder. Remember that you only need this to hold him for a second while you lock the triangle.
Ok, so either you lock the triangle or are about to, and he stacks you. Now what? If you don't react there's a good chance you're going to lose the pressure on his neck, and eventually your legs will pop open. The answer is ridiculously simple - walk backwards on your shoulder blades. As he comes forward on his knees you can outpace him while either locking the move or continuing to squeeze. There's a great chance he'll end up falling on his face with your triangle on his back, which actually sucked more than the normal triangle - it hurts the neck, back, everything really, just a really unpleasant feeling and you're still being choked. I haven't played with the move much but I suspect you can compound the effect by walking backwards to one side on your shoulder blades instead of just going straight back. I'll have to try it out.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Back at it ... take two
So after taking two very necessary weeks off to heal (well, mostly because the gym closed for Xmas and New Years) I came back and got sick after one workout. Meh. My throat then started hurting AFTER I got better, so I felt like crap, then got better but had a sore throat. Meh. So back tonight, with everything feeling pretty much intact except my right ring finger. It's just a little sore, but it's been the exact same "little sore" for over two months now - it's not getting any better. So tomorrow morning I see a doctor in case there's some fluid trapped in there or something.
Enough of that crap, a cool technique has been stuck in my head today. I only have about 10 minutes before I need to shut down and head to the gym so it'll have to be a quick post.
So you've got your opponent in side control, but he's turned into you. Hmmm. Normally we try and flatten him out, or even push him until he's facing away from us. So aside from cramming your head into his shoulder area to flatten him out, what's available here? A pretty cool armbar it turns out.
Assume you've passed his legs by going to your left, which means in side control your left arm is the one around his neck. He's turning into you, meaning his left shoulder is up off the mat. No problem. While maintaining tight downward control and pressure on his torso like normal, move your right arm so that your right armpit is cupping his left shoulder. It's a strange move, because at this point you're kind of twisting at the waist and looking away from him. From there, slip both your hands down his left arm and hyper-extend it. If you've managed to keep proper pressure on his shoulder he won't be able to escape, or resist at all for that matter.
There are other details to this one, but I haven't been training or posting (stupid holidays always mess me up *shakes fist*) so I wanted to bang this out real quick. I'll re-visit this with more details soon.
Enough of that crap, a cool technique has been stuck in my head today. I only have about 10 minutes before I need to shut down and head to the gym so it'll have to be a quick post.
So you've got your opponent in side control, but he's turned into you. Hmmm. Normally we try and flatten him out, or even push him until he's facing away from us. So aside from cramming your head into his shoulder area to flatten him out, what's available here? A pretty cool armbar it turns out.
Assume you've passed his legs by going to your left, which means in side control your left arm is the one around his neck. He's turning into you, meaning his left shoulder is up off the mat. No problem. While maintaining tight downward control and pressure on his torso like normal, move your right arm so that your right armpit is cupping his left shoulder. It's a strange move, because at this point you're kind of twisting at the waist and looking away from him. From there, slip both your hands down his left arm and hyper-extend it. If you've managed to keep proper pressure on his shoulder he won't be able to escape, or resist at all for that matter.
There are other details to this one, but I haven't been training or posting (stupid holidays always mess me up *shakes fist*) so I wanted to bang this out real quick. I'll re-visit this with more details soon.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Back at it ... kind of
So the holidays are over, and I took two weeks off. Totally off. I figured this was the time I would spend healing away from the mat, so I might as well totally relax and come back in anxious and ready to get going. It worked ... kind of. The day before my day back I did a light calisthenics routine so I wouldn't shock my body the next day. Then my morning back I did another light routine with my medicine ball for the same reason. That night I spent 90 minutes grappling and 60 minutes kickboxing ... then got sick overnight.
It's not that well known that an intense workout can degrade your immune system for up to 72 hours. I knew that, and I knew my wife was sick, but I figured I'd risk it. Kind of stupid in hind sight. Probably should have been stupid in *foresight*.
At any rate it was fun to finally use my legs in the kickboxing class. Up until Monday night I was just doing hands only because I didn't want to stress the graft I have in my knee from ACL reconstruction January 2009. It takes a full year to get 100% and tai kicks pull directly against it.
Pulling kicks out of a kickboxing workout sounds like it should take away roughly 50% of your arsenal, but it's closer to 75%. The fact is when you learn to use your knees, elbows, feet and hands together you come to use each for feinting and setting up other moves. Once you yank a piece of that holistic pie it kind of wreaks havoc. You can really feint with a low kick when you explicitly asked your training partner to just box for the sake of your bum knee. Neither can you work one kick a few times and then change it up to throw him off. Pure boxing was surprisingly boring, though I leave room for the possibility of that stemming from gigantic 16-ounce gloves making most attacks easily blockable.
I remembered quickly how much I rely on my lead leg. Specifically I love to snap out those lead-leg push kicks, but instead of bringing the knee up and shoving outward in a push, I snap the ball of the foot upward into the stomach. The former is a technique to keep people away from you, and it might hurt. The latter is an attack. I accidentally dropped a guy with it, and I really did pull the kick.
The BJJ class was interesting as well. I worked with a new student. Only four classes prior to Monday night, but with the caveat that he literally weighed about 100 pounds more than me. It's helpful to work with huge guys sometimes for a variety of reasons. Monday night it was helpful in that it made me focus on minutiae of basics - things that work against a 200 pounder don't work against a 260 pounder. You really have to nail the technique, and even then certain things just aren't going to work no matter what you do.
As retarded as it sounds, I was doing the most basic hip escape from mount incorrectly. After about 4 years of BJJ I was performing something I learned the first month wrong. /sigh The key to getting your legs back between you and your opponent with this escape is to leave one leg (right leg for this description) flat, and use your left foot to reach across your flattened right leg and hook your opponent's foot. Then pull his left foot over your right knee, THEN bring your knee up. Once you get the first side done you'll be in half guard and can hip out real quickly to get your second knee free and replace guard.
I was trying to use my right elbow to create enough space to force my right knee up between my opponent's legs and get to half guard. This tends to work ok against people my size, but as I mentioned above, against someone about 100 pounds your senior ... this sloppy garbage just doesn't cut it.
It's not that well known that an intense workout can degrade your immune system for up to 72 hours. I knew that, and I knew my wife was sick, but I figured I'd risk it. Kind of stupid in hind sight. Probably should have been stupid in *foresight*.
At any rate it was fun to finally use my legs in the kickboxing class. Up until Monday night I was just doing hands only because I didn't want to stress the graft I have in my knee from ACL reconstruction January 2009. It takes a full year to get 100% and tai kicks pull directly against it.
Pulling kicks out of a kickboxing workout sounds like it should take away roughly 50% of your arsenal, but it's closer to 75%. The fact is when you learn to use your knees, elbows, feet and hands together you come to use each for feinting and setting up other moves. Once you yank a piece of that holistic pie it kind of wreaks havoc. You can really feint with a low kick when you explicitly asked your training partner to just box for the sake of your bum knee. Neither can you work one kick a few times and then change it up to throw him off. Pure boxing was surprisingly boring, though I leave room for the possibility of that stemming from gigantic 16-ounce gloves making most attacks easily blockable.
I remembered quickly how much I rely on my lead leg. Specifically I love to snap out those lead-leg push kicks, but instead of bringing the knee up and shoving outward in a push, I snap the ball of the foot upward into the stomach. The former is a technique to keep people away from you, and it might hurt. The latter is an attack. I accidentally dropped a guy with it, and I really did pull the kick.
The BJJ class was interesting as well. I worked with a new student. Only four classes prior to Monday night, but with the caveat that he literally weighed about 100 pounds more than me. It's helpful to work with huge guys sometimes for a variety of reasons. Monday night it was helpful in that it made me focus on minutiae of basics - things that work against a 200 pounder don't work against a 260 pounder. You really have to nail the technique, and even then certain things just aren't going to work no matter what you do.
As retarded as it sounds, I was doing the most basic hip escape from mount incorrectly. After about 4 years of BJJ I was performing something I learned the first month wrong. /sigh The key to getting your legs back between you and your opponent with this escape is to leave one leg (right leg for this description) flat, and use your left foot to reach across your flattened right leg and hook your opponent's foot. Then pull his left foot over your right knee, THEN bring your knee up. Once you get the first side done you'll be in half guard and can hip out real quickly to get your second knee free and replace guard.
I was trying to use my right elbow to create enough space to force my right knee up between my opponent's legs and get to half guard. This tends to work ok against people my size, but as I mentioned above, against someone about 100 pounds your senior ... this sloppy garbage just doesn't cut it.
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