Back ... yet again

Last night was fun in a sado-masochistic way. Directly after spending a week in Vegas, where I trained twice with master Cavalcanti, I got sick, spending two weeks on my ass. I came back for a week and trained a few nights, mostly kickboxing, then spent another two weeks on call. So I was out 4 of 5 weeks. Naturally this got me my ass kicked in royal fashion.

My conditioning needed to come back after being sick, but work got in the way. Plus I've been studying for work and for fun, so my mind has been out of the game. This equated to my being fuzzy-headed and unsure of my next move, while at the same time feeling sluggish and fat. I got tapped three times by guys I've beaten numerous times, not really coming close to beating them at all last night.

So the lesson. The techniques were review, but that was fine. They also were about 70% gi-centric, meaning they could work no-gi, but would be much harder to pull off.

Assume you have your opponent in your guard and you want to trap his left arm underneath your back. Grab his left sleeve with your left hand, break his grip and swim your arm over your own head, bringing his wrist with you. Once you do a pinwheely loop you can tighten your right arm and squeeze his left bicep/tricep between your arm and ribs. Now with your right hand reach across his throat and grab his right lapel. You can feed it with your left and get your grip a little tighter, meaning your right hand is higher up next to his throat, even behind his neck a little.

Once you have that grip he's pretty well stuck. From there you want to drop your left leg to the mat and use it to swivel your torso (remaining in place, just changing angles) and grabbing his gi jacket right next to his left jaw muscle. Now swivel back, grinding your left forearm under his jaw for the choke.

If you can't score that choke, which isn't that easy since he likely knows what you're up to, you can armbar him. With his arm trapped, use your left forearm to create distance between his head and you, while using your feet to do the same on his hips. This should straighten his arm out a bit, though I got in a little trouble by slacking the grip on his upper arm with my arm/ribs. If that loosens at all he can just twist his arm and nullify the move. Once you've got distance and his arm is pretty straight, you can use your left foot to push his right knee backward and make him kiss the mat. Even if that doesn't work you can still finish by moving your right knee over his left elbow (the trapped one) and using it to straighten his arm out.

Finally you can sweep from the trapped-arm position. Just swivel around and grab under his right leg with your left arm, then roll him over. You've already got his left arm trapped so he can't stop you by posting. He can, of course, just base out or move his knee back so you can't grab behind it. At that point you can jerk his torso up toward your head and sneak your feet down from a closed guard to just inside his ankles. From there you can straighten his legs out pretty uncomfortably. If you get that far, try to trap the second arm, even clumsily, then move both feet to rest under his inner thighs as hooks. If you score the hooks and control the arms you can just hip out to one side and he'll practically dump himself over to one side, letting you sweep and mount him.