The Guruma's

Both Ryan and Big Stuart were absent this week along with Mark who hasn’t been in a while and Troy, who is currently injured but comes and watches anyway, due mainly to the fact that Ynez, his significant other was taking part. It was also nice to see that Jamie was back after a 1 month hiatus. With the warm up out of the way we went in to Newaza and I paired up with Oli. Graeme mentioned that we would only have a few rounds of Newaza and that the duration would be one and a half minutes, which is half the length of the matches in the upcoming Newaza competition that I have entered. I decided I wasn’t going to pull guard against Oli and instead pushed him back and attempted to pass his guard. I managed to get one leg out but he trapped the other one. Whilst I struggled to release my leg Oli went for a double color choke but as I was in half guard I never felt threatened by this and continued to try and work my way leg free. When I did finally pass Oli’s guard he turned in to me and immediately got back to full guard and at this point Graeme called matte. Next up was Black Belt Stuart but this time we were told to start with one of us in the turtle position. BB Stuart turtled up first and when Graeme told us to begin I decided to try the Jimmy Pedro turnover in to Juji-gatame that I have seen a few times on YouTube. Amazingly I got this to work first time and I think BB Stuart was quite impressed. He allowed me to try this same technique a couple more times on him before Graeme told us to swap over which meant it was my time to assume the turtle position. I quickly decided that I would try and roll out and get to guard and when Graeme told us to start I did just that. BB Stuart tried to pass my guard a couple of times and did manage to get to half guard before I was able to recover to full guard again. He commented after that I had good defense from my back.

My last roll was with Jamie and being a white belt and a new white belt at that he doesn’t know much in the way of technique. This time one of us had to start flat on our backs as though we had just been thrown with the other person kneeling between our legs. When we started my intention was to quickly sweep Jamie but although he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing he resisted my efforts to turn sweep him. He was clearly using all his strength against me and I wished that we could have had a 10 minute roll as he would have then realised why that is not a good idea. Still he didn’t give me much to work with and because he didn’t attempt to move even my old trusty favourite San-gaku-jime didn’t work on him.

We then swapped over and as soon as we started I passed his guard and quickly got mount and was looking to get a tate-shiho-gatame hold on him with the intention of finishing with an arm triangle but he was again using all his strength and actually grunting and straining and making all sorts of noises usually associated with weight lifters. As he was pushing me off with his arms I grabbed one and started slowly applying Ude-garami, again he screamed and bucked. I told him to tap if it hurt be he didn’t so I cranked some more but annoyingly I couldn’t quite get the leverage from full guard to finish but once I thought about passing to side control he got his arm out. Realising that time was running out, and still in the mount I moved up his body and tried to isolate one of his arms again to go for a Juji-gatame but again I was too eager and although I had the arm he managed to squirm out and he ended up in my guard but was now in a perfect San-gaku-jime position but before I had time to apply it Graeme called matte. Jamie looked knackered whereas I was just a little warm, which is a good sign that I am fit enough for this upcoming competition. I was however slightly annoyed that I wasn’t able to submit Jamie. I really didn’t want to resort to using my strength against him but with him using all of his I realised that my technique was slightly lacking or maybe I just didn’t follow the old rule of “position before submission”

On to Tachiwaza and we learnt two new throws tonight which were Hiza-guruma and O-guruma (This Tenchique is not listed on the BJA website so I will try and add a video at a latter time. I was paired with Peter for these two and with Peter being fairly heavy and strong he’s not the easiest person to throw so if you manage to throw him you must be doing something right. With the Hiza-guruma, after a couple of amendments to my foot placement and the position of my body, remembering to step across with my left foot so that it was almost in line with Peter’s feet, I was able to throw him quite well.

With the O-guruma I think my arm movements were not right as I was trying to replicate the movement you would do with a Tai-otoshi instead of the wheel movement that I should have been doing. Unfortunately we never really had the time for me to perfect this before we went on to Randori.

Now, normally I would provide a blow by blow summary of the Randori I did last night and with whom I did it but I honestly cannot remember which could mean a couple of things. Either nothing of note happened and due to being in a permanently tired state at present which is all down to the broken sleep my daughter has introduced me to, I have forgotten. Or I got thrown hard on my head and have lost my memory. I’m gonna go with the first one as I don’t feel any pain in my head.

One thing I do remember is that Graeme mentioned that next week is the last lesson before the Easter break when the club will be closed. Not good timing when you have a tournament coming up. Still I will now definitely do back to BJJ for a couple of weeks which actually works out ok as I will be able to brush up on my groundwork. It will be interesting to see how much more advanced the white belts have gotten since I last rolled with them especially the likes of Seb who started when I did. I’m guessing I will get owned by most of them but it will still be good fun nonetheless.