31.08.20
Monday night brought my client up to the fourth hour of their current Submission Grappling course. Tonight we looked at guard-passing and focused on the combat base posture. I find this posture is be very effective and efficient, and a great way to look at taking a guard apart. Having found ourselves in a standing pass position with the final technique I went back to the perspective of person holding guard and introduced the long-guard concept in submission grappling.
We began with a warm-up of callisthenics that targeted the posture in question and included dynamic stretching to the abductor muscles. This was in addition to the usual snaking, crawling and sport-specific solo technique drills.
The lesson covered three guard passes. All passes were performed using the combat base posture. The client was shown how to move from safety position in the guard to opening a closed guard and then moving into the combat base. An important point I made was to ensure the back remained in a neutral position once the guard had been opened and that the stance was in an L shape. The lead knee should be pointing towards the ceiling with its shin firmly pressed agains the inside of the opponent’s thigh and the foot flat on the floor. The rear leg knee should be pointed off at 90 degrees with the knee pointed on a horizontal plane with the shin on the ground and the foot in plantar dorsification position (up on your toes). Our first pass put us into the double-under position for stacking and passing. We then looked at the opponent countering the combat base by moving into a semi-scissor position on their side. This led to the fighter pressuring through the guard with a back-step pass. Finally, we moved to standing as the opponent disengaged as a counter and went to the matador pass. As mentioned earlier, this provided a decent introduction to the long-guard and I introduced the hook or De La Riva guard.