Attended the takedown class and wondered how I used to do sprawling drills and breakfalls for 45 minutes at a shot…a few minutes has me gasping and sweating.

Takedowns & techniques worked: sprawls, technical standup (without the kick. http://www.grapplearts.com/2014/08/bjj-self-defense-part-4-the-technical-standup/?nabe=5701865648947200:1), peeling the grip off the lapel, single leg + counter (get head into attacker’s chest and mule kick the leg free), snapdown series (jerk with arms, jerk with arms and a step back, “snap the towel” and step back), snapdown + hiza guruma, snapdown + double leg. It took me a while to figure out that the trip we were doing was actually called “hiza guruma”, but perseverance and hitting the judoinfo.com site paid off! It also led me to spend more money at Amazon on a few judo books, too.

Anyway, check it out: http://judoinfo.com/images/animations/blue/hizaguruma.htm . When it’s done right, its effortless.

Moving into the grappling portion of the night, we started with breakfalls, penetration steps, and shrimping drills. Most were familiar but my back roll and penetration steps were pretty sloppy and need more drilling. There was a funky reverse shrimping movement that I hadn’t done before that wasn’t at all intuitive, too. Here’s an explanation of the movement from Ritchie Yip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io63PwUHNrc

After 5 or 10 minutes of breakfalls we covered pulling guard – gripping sleeve and collar, placing a foot in the crease of the same side hip, then dragging the opponent into the guard. This progressed naturally into the “monkey flip” aka tomoe nage. http://judoinfo.com/images/animations/blue/tomoenage.htm

The progression then led to various sweeps from the guard against a standing opponent – I assume the intent was to chain these attacks against an opponent who didn’t get pulled down into the closed guard position. The “Tripod” and “Tomahawk” were the ones we worked. http://www.grapplearts.com/2013/07/3-open-guard-options-vs-standing-opponents/?nabe=5701865648947200:1

There were also some De la Riva sweeps and a monkey flip that I grappling dummied for but didn’t practice myself – I had enough trouble with the basic open guard sweeps. I like the De la Riva quite a bit but have fairly short legs so am not sure how readily I can make some of those moves work.

I was pretty well rung out at that point so skipped the open rolling again. I’ll add that to the regimen soonish.