Day 22: Escape from Jitsu Island

Yesterday and today were similar, so I'll mash them up together.

We've been working controls from the spider guard, specifically the arm wrap. Get sleeve grips ("joysticks") with your knees inside uke's arms and your feet on his hips. Then you can escape your hips and wrap the arm you escaped away from. Return your hips and get that foot back on uke's hip. From there you can control the other arm with foot-on-bicep. You can bicep sweep from here, or go for the triangle.

If you lose control of the unwrapped arm, stay with it. Turn on your side and use your knee to keep uke from coming around. Recover to your knees, taking his arm with you. Then adjust your angle to go back to spider, or pull him in for full guard. If you're good you can roll for the omoplata, but I'm not, so I didn't.

Both days we worked on using and passing this guard. I had some mixed results. I caught Damon with the bicep sweep, which got me pretty stoked. Craig got his knee in between my legs and broke my grip, and it was downhill from there.

During Jack's daily ass-kicking, he showed me a neat escape from the triangle. Immediately after it gets slapped on, slam your body (and uke's leg) down on the mat to the side of the leg that is right on your ear. Then you can hop your legs over uke and twist out and escape. It sounds tough but it's not.