Thursday’s fundamentals class was pretty full with 20 odd people. We kept it pretty low key with the nationals coming up on Saturday and started with a light warm up followed by a drill to help reinforce some basic guard principles. From there we moved on to the leg over rollover sweep from closed guard, where our opponent makes a mistake when passing by posting on his leg, and leaving it within our reach.

Secondly, we covered a slight variation of the same sweep, but this time our opponent is a bit smarter and does not give us the posting leg, so we attack the other leg and apply the same sweep.

Once we covered the above two sweeps we moved on to the concept that all sweeps lead to armbars. We went for the same 2 sweeps, but this time our opponent resists the sweep, we counter by applying the straight armbar from the guard.

Finally to finish we looked at applying the sweep, our opponent once again resists and we move into the armbar, for whatever reason the armbar does not come off for us, so we attack the opponents other arm by applying the omoplata or bent shoulder lock.

The techniques covered in the class were far from fundamental. The main point of the class however was to try and illustrate that often when we wrestle we go to closed guard and hang on, another option is to loosen up a bit and apply a basic sweep, from there once we are confident with opening up a bit, we can apply a variety of finishes depending on our opponents reaction.

Hopefully it will add to everyone’s understanding and game in some way and good luck to all those that are competing in the Nat’s on Saturday.

Ko