It's just that mistakes made from mechanically advantageous positions tend to be more forgiving.
Last night's BJJ session centred around countering someone whose tripoding to choke you from inside your own closed guard. It's not the best or smartest move but it can still work. It can at least make you open your guard for them. But It's still a mistake-a to make-a, for many reasons:
- Committing the weight forward,
- Making the legs light,
- Committing the arms to their upper body,
- Leaving their hips free...etc.
So we spent the lesson working counters to most of these mistakes:
- Sweeping,
- Armbarring,
- Taking the back.
- Soultrain even pulled off a nice heel hook transition at one point!
All well and good. The thing is, I often catch myself make stupid mistakes like these (committing too much weight forward...etc.) but usually from mount or side-control. I lean too much in this or that direction or commit my arms too early to a technique and I often get away with it. There are just simply wider margins when you have the positional advantage. They can still throw you, joint-lock you or take your back. It's just so much harder, more obvious and hence easier for you to stop or even counter.
It becomes my responsibility to keep my ego in check and realise that I simply got lucky. When I'm in mount and I almost get thrown off or even worse, it really is my responsibility to go back and check why that even came close to happening, rather than pat myself on the back, content that I got away with a quick last-second recovery. "All's well that ends well", but why did it even get to start, never mind come close to ending?
While this might be the kind of thing that corrects itself with lots of mat time, I think it's a perfect opportunity to put the Part Time Grappling mentality to test. Why not learn 3-4 things at once if you can?
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2 comments:
Great post! That pic is hilarious!
It's very encouraging to know that mistakes are made by experienced practitioners such as yourself.
I've always felt like the only one on the mat who is clueless as to why I'm mounted, stuck in everyone's guard and constantly tapping all the time.
After class, I've been focusing on how They got the advantage and trying to think of counters to their actions. Rather than going over what I did to enable them to get to the end result.
Thanks for the new point of view Liam! I'm sure it will help plug up several of these holes in my game.
Why thank you so much Mr Skin! I'm veeery uncomfortable with the label "experienced" but I get where you are coming from.
In the end, there is only you. Imagine if you rolled with people who couldn't get anything on you. You should still be able to learn from that.
Don't be astranger now bro, Keep letting us know who it's hangging.
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