Tag Archives: sweep

Nobody Likes Drilling Sweeps

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sumi-gaeshiDrilling is about doing something 50, 100, 500 times. When you do something 100 times, the little unpleasant aspects get magnified.

There are techniques where my drilling partner does nothing more than put their body in the correct position, provide the correct resistance, and maybe move their arms and legs in a certain way. There’s not much strain on them, and their body never has to hit the mat. A good example of such a technique is the x-pass or almost any guard pass.

On the other hand, there are techniques that do require the partner’s body to get some air time and hit the mat. In judo, it’s throws, in bjj, it’s sweeps. The basic butterfly sweep, for example, seems innocent at first, but when done a lot of times with good technique can put a lot of impact strain on the partner’s shoulder.

As you can probably already tell, I have a seemingly excessive concern for my drilling partner’s well being. Part of it has to do with my nature. But mainly, it’s just a fact that the less pain involved in drilling the longer you can drill, the more willing you will be to drill, and the more likely you are to be in a good mood while drilling. I all for working hard and working through the pain, but if you don’t have to, it’s much better. Work smarter not harder.

This is why I’ve drilled guard passing much more than sweeps. But that slowly has to change. While I play the butterfly game a lot in training, there is no substitute for drilling.

There is no deep insight in this post, just some thoughts. I often struggle with techniques that may be painful to my training partner. From day one, I loved the idea that jiu jitsu has a large number of techniques (e.g. chokes) that could painlessly defeat somebody going 100%. The problem is that there are techniques that do cause pain on their way to submission, everything ranging from armlocks to neck cranks to certain versions of arm-in chokes to wrist locks to calf crushers. That’s effective beautiful jiu jitsu as well. I continue to struggle with finding a place for these techniques in my game and my personality.

Flower Sweep

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Training journal for Thursday at BJJU…

Good training in the afternoon and night. High level black, brown, purple belts packed the mats. There were so many exciting matches going on, both gi and no-gi… with reverse de la riva, inverted guard, one legged x-guard, triangle attempts from every angle, crazy backtakes…

In fundamentals, the technique was the flower sweep, which never really clicked for me until today. The setup is key. Jared put the left foot on the hip and used a bump one way to set up the flower sweep the other way.

The combination of off-balancing one way and then the other way is prevalent in a lot of jiu jitsu techniques but especially for closed guard attacks.

Here’s a video of Rafael Lovato Jr describing the basic flower sweep and his variation of the off-balance to one side as a setup for the sweep. PS: He refers to it as the Xande sweep.

And here’s him pulling it off in competition:

Also, here’s a video of the very entertaining Kurt Osiander showing a variation of the flower sweep:

X-Guard Submissions and Taking the Back

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I’ve been playing a lot of x-guard lately. Most of what I’ve been doing is a set of 5 sweep from the x-guard position that I think are commonly known. In either case, I’d like to also take the back, because I find it’s often there. Several people show it on YouTube, but here’s Marcelo Garcia showing it:

I’ve practiced that move before, but just haven’t done it extensively. What I haven’t practiced before is submissions from x-guard. Below are some of the better videos I found showing good ideas.

A good tight armbar after the sweep:

An natural-looking switch to a kneebar from the x-guard position:

An  interesting sweep to leg lock:

I’ll have to work on all of these this week when I get some open mat time in.

X-Guard is My Gateway Drug

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It’s fair to say that this was the week of the x-guard. Everyone everywhere was working on it. I was entering and sweeping with it multiple times on almost every set I did throughout the week.

The x-guard has been essential to the development of my game as it allowed me to focus on something I was pretty good at off my back. That’s why I’m referring to it as the “gateway drug” for playing off of my back. Having the confidence to go on my back then led to more confidence in exploring the butterfly, half-guard, and open guard positions. I think I’ll always be a top player, simply because of how much takedown work I do, but playing off my back seems to teach me a lot more (at this moment) about the fundamentals of jiu jitsu. Here’s a clip of some x-guard positional training:

Guard Passing Drill

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I listened to The Fightworks Podcast episode 227 with an interview of Marshal Carper, a blue belt in BJJ and the author of a new book “The Cauliflower Chronicles” about dropping everything and moving to Hawaii to train jiu jitsu as a white belt at BJ Penn’s Academy.

The Cauliflower Chronicles: A Grappler's Tale of Self-Discovery and Island LivingIt sounds like a cool book, not just because of the idea, but because of the writing. It seems that Carper tells a good story.

Anyway, one thing he said stuck in my mind. He described what a typical day at the academy was like and one thing he mentioned was that every single class (afternoon and night) involved about 20-30 minutes of guard passing training. Basically, you start in close guard and go until the guy on the bottom gets a sweep or the guy on top passes. This is just one of many types of positional training, but it was very interesting to me that instead of going for variety, they really emphasized this aspect of jiu jitsu in every single class. Perhaps such focus on a particular position (in this case, an extremely common position) for a prelonged period of time is very effective at elevating the skill of the club as a whole in that position. Everyone builds off of each other’s growing expertise in the position.

Obviously this is an extreme approach, but it also reminded me that I do very little positional training myself and that both Xande and Fredson when they visited emphasized the importance of this kind of training.

Early Morning Training with Ray

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If it’s before noon, it’s early morning in the Lex Fridman brain.

Ray and I got on the mat at Osagame to do a little training. Turned out to be a good two hours. Here’s a few clips from that session.

I asked Ray about a couple of issues that I’ve been running up against:

  1. Defending the sweep from De La Riva guard
  2. Defending the bull pass from the butterfly guard
  3. Escaping side control to turtle
  4. Reguarding to half guard or full guard from turtle

Then we trained. I enjoy (in a sick masochistic way) playing half guard or butterfly guard against Ray, because he makes it very difficult to do anything from either. He stays very low and applies a lot of pressure.

Once he passes, he consistently gets the choke within about a minute. I need to find an answer besides just turtling and then trying to reguard from turtle. The answer probably is just the fundamentals: create space and reguard. Given how tight his game is, this will require a lot of improvement for me.