Training 11/11

Nov 11th

Posted by J in Brazilian Ju Jutsu

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Today started by working on pulling guard if you feel like your opponent is better on his feet then you and then a sequence from open guard.  I have rarely tried to pull guard from standing because I always feel like I have the advantage on my feet, and rarely feel comfortable on my back but I really like this sequence.

Pulling Guard from Standing Position

Pulling guard from a standing position is very easy and felt very natural to me.  We fell into an open guard and then had the option of closing it from there.

  1. From a tie up, put your foot on the same side as your lapel grabbing hand on your opponents hip.
  2. Fall flat on your back while maintaining grip on their sleeve and lapel.
  3. While falling throw your other leg behind their back.  With the foot that you have put on their hip, bend your knee and try to keep it on the inside of your arms.  This will put their shoulder on your shin.
  4. Pull them tight and straighten you leg to close your guard, or just keep them tight for open guard

One good thing to keep in mind if you attempt to pull guard in a tournament situation is that you can’t let them be grabbing for your leg when you do this or they will get points for a takedown.  Make sure you have ample space and there is no way the judges can give your opponent credit for a takedown.

Open Guard to Sweep

From the open guard with your knee inside above there are a ton of moves that are available. Here is a sweep which can turn into an armbar, or if it fails segues nicely into a kimura.

  1. From Open Guard, you control their lapel and arm with your knee inside their arm (see-above)
  2. Tighten your knees to control their arm that was on your lapel.  Move your free hand to their sleeve that is on your chest.
  3. Move your outside arm down to their other sleeve.  You should have control of both sleeves at this point, one leg around their back, one leg bent and on their armpit.
  4. Shoot your leg that was around their back straight to sink it deeper and throw it over their arm that is pinned to your chest nestling it in the same armpit as your bent leg.  Maintain control of both of their sleeves while you do this.
  5. From this position you can stall pretty much indefinitely if so long as you control both of their sleeves.  You can use your legs to control their spacing from you and they will tire themselves out trying to get an escape.

I really liked this position.  It is really easy to attain and one you have it, very easy to maintain.  Just keep hand control throughout to prevent them from pulling away and use your legs to keep from getting smothered.

To complete the sweep:

  1. Pull hard on their arm that is pinned to your chest.  Extend it and go for a cheap armbar against your own thigh.
  2. The armbar will almost assuredly not work because they will bend their arm, so rock them up on your body and crank their arm to the floor.  This alone may roll them over.
  3. If you can’t roll them over because they have a good base, use your arm that was controlling their arm NOT on you chest and grab their leg.  Pull it up toward your head and control it.  That should be enough to get them into a position where you an roll them.

Sweep to Armbar

This arm-bar felt very tight for me and came very naturally from the sweep.  I feel like this may be on the few arm bars I can pull off.

  1. As you execute the above sweep and roll your opponent to their side, control their arm that was on your chest.
  2. When they hit the ground immediately move your butt toward them.  This is to get their elbow above your pelvis.
  3. Once you have done this you are already in armbar position.  Just control their sleeve and fall back in to the armbar.
  4. When extended make sure that you pull the arm toward their pinky and keep your legs pinched together.

Open Guard to Kimura

This was a very slick move and also something I think that I could pull off when rolling.  I loved this class because I actually felt like all of these things we do-able for me right away in live action.

  1. Attain the open guard described above all the way to the point where you are about to execute the sweep.
  2. When your opponent relaxes, maintain control of their sleeves and take your leg that was bent in their armpit, kick it out and snap it back (like kickstarting a motorcycle).  This puts your knee on the other side of their arm and begins the Kimura.
  3. Take your other leg and make sure it is high and lateral across their back.  Maintain control of their sleeve on the arm you are attacking.  Keep everything very tight, slowly switch hands and finish the kimura.

We didn’t roll today, but I rolled briefly before class.  I beat my guy with a rear naked choke (he was a white belt about my size).  Greg left me with a few good takeaways today:

  • Proper grip of the gi is done with by wrapping one finger in the gi and curling the hand up under it.  This forces them to pull your index finger through the rest of your others to get free, rather than just pulling the gi out.
  • Always finish arm bars but moving the arm toward its pinky finger.
  • Always pinch your legs when attacking arms.  If they can’t wiggle then you control where they move.

Training 11/4

Nov 8th

Posted by J in Brazilian Ju Jutsu

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It has been 2 weeks since I last trained, I tried to come in last Wednesday but they were testing. Rodrigo ran warmups and taught the first technique, then Greg finished up the rest of the class. It was great to take a class from him again, it has been years (literally). He is such a technical teacher and has such great anecdotes that really bring his lessons to life.

This day (and the next couple weeks apparently) was devoted to “bad positions”. So we worked a counter to a hip throw and how to work out of a failed shot.

Hip-Throw Counter

This technique was supposed to be used if your opponent attempts to hip throw you from a standing position.

  1. Start in a standing tie-up, one hand on lapel, the other on the elbow.  Your opponent steps in, shoots his hand around your back as if about to throw you.
  2. Counter by immediately clamping down your arm around the arm he shoots in with.  This is very similar to a wizzer, except instead of cranking down, keep your head tight and grab your own lapel with the wizzering arm.
  3. Grab their lapel (the other one) with your other hand.  Then transition your hand on your lapel to your other bicep.  You should end up with a figure-four around their arm holding their lapel.
  4. Take your far leg and put it behind their knee as your fall to your back.  Use your leg and your arms to roll them over you.  You should end up in side control.

While this move is a little hard to describe it felt very natural.  Just falling was enough to get my partner (about my size) to roll over me even when he resisted.  The hand transitions can be done pretty slowly if you lock down tight, use your head and create friction between the gis.

Failed Shot

Sprawl reversal

This was the first of 3 techniques that you might use from a failed shot.  When you shoot and fail, the first thing you want to do is control an arm to prevent them from taking your back.  This technique assumes that you have control of an arm.

  1. Start with your opponent sprawling on you, you’re on your knees.
  2. Grab control of one of their arms and pull it tight underneath you.  You want to put your shoulder into the middle of their bicep, this is important to prevent the guillotine.
  3. Drive hard into this arm, post up the opposite leg and use it to roll your opponent (think russian arm drag for how to use their arm).  This will roll your opponent when you get the angle correct.
  4. As soon as your opponent rolls, control his near leg.  Always control the near leg to prevent them from taking (re-taking) guard.  Then plow them until they are on their back.  You should have their arm and near leg and side control when you are done.

Opponent takes your back

This technique is done if you cannot take control of their arm and they take your back (referee’s position).  This is very similar to the chicken wing in wrestling.

  1. Hook whichever arm is below your shoulders.  Keep it very tight.  Your opponent cannot choke you with just one arm, so keep control of one of them.
  2. Grab your opponents pant leg with your other arm (behind you)
  3. Roll over your partner on the shoulder of the arm that you control.  This is very important, otherwise you roll right into a choke.  Roll over your clear shoulder.  Use their pant leg and your arm control to prvent them from basing out.
  4. Keep control of both limbs and plow into them to roll them flat.  You know have side control or scarf hold, etc.

Opponent has one hook in

If you oppoenent takes your back and manages to get one hook in you are in trouble.  This technique is another roll that attempts to clear you out of that.

  1. Control an arm and try to get it under your own.  Hook behind their elbow if you can and keep it tight as in the above technique.  If possible control the arm opposite the hook so you can grab the pant leg of the leg hooking you, but this is not necessary.
  2. Roll on the shoulder of the arm that you are controlling.  Control your opponents leg with your other arm.
  3. Work your way out of the hook while controlling your opponents leg and then roll over guard, side-control, mount, etc.

This technique felt very similar to how you escape from 2 hooks, except its way easier to base out and using a hand if you can spare one makes it easier to shed the hooks.

We didn’t roll at all during this class, but thats ok, I was pretty gassed.  Greg talked a lot at the end of the class and it was really helpful, a few takeaways that I had:

  • Always control your opponents near leg when you are in side control, they really can pull guard then.  Straighten your arm if possible.
  • Always turn toward the legs in a scramble.  This is where positions are made or lost.
  • Your opponent can’t choke you with one arm, just control one solidly.
  • Gi action is much slower.  Just try to win inches.  Inches add up, so if you can gain an inch and hold, gain an inch and hold you will end up in a good position.
  • Always be deliberate.  This is a very very important one for me.   I think that is why I have been having a tough time improving (aside from lack of practice :) ).  I need to always know what the outcome of my next move will be.  Stop creating scrambles.  I like to create scrambles because I am fast and strong enough that I generally end up in a good position when the dust settles, but that is keeping me from improving.  If I always know exactly what I think the result of each technique will be I can do a few things:
    • If the technique succeeds then I can become more strategic and hone the array of moves I use, when I use them, etc.
    • If it fails I can figure out why.  Was I in the wrong position?  Bad technique?  Too weak?  Knowing the answer to this is how you get better.

All in all, I really enjoyed it.  It was fun to work with Greg again and I think the advice about being deliberate will really help me going forward.

Bullet plugin

Nov 3rd

Posted by J in Programming

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Recently I have been working on improving the performance in one of my clients Rails applications, trying to get page load times down.  Looking at the query log it was obvious that there was way too much activity going on for what was being rendered on the page–there were N+1 queries all over the place.  This was nothing a few joins (or eager loads as the rails folks like to say) wouldn’t fix.  So after changing the queries to make sure that all the necessary data was gathered in just one pass, I wondered how many other places this was cropping up in the application. That is when I stumbled upon flyerhzm’s Bullet Gem.

In short the gem monitors the queries that your server is making and notifies you as to whether or not you are encountering any N+1 scenarios.  It also notifies you as to whether or not you have unused eager loads.  It can be configured to notify you via javascript alerts, growl notifications, firebug notifications, or just log the instances.

Thus far it has been invaluable in finding instances where an eager load would help.  It can (and should) be configured to run only in Development mode and will sit in the background until it has something to notify you about, so you can just turn it on, keep coding, and as you browse around your local instance, get notified as to potential areas for optimization.

While it is definitely worth installing a few things to note:

  1. You still need to use your judgement as to what is the right call, this just points out areas to investigate (though it does tell you what models to include)
  2. It has some bugs still.  There are instances where it correctly insists that you should include something, and then incorrectly tells you that you have an unused eager load once you include it

If you have your development.rb file in source control and shared among developers, one slight modification to the code on the github site that removes the gem dependency from your fellow developers is as follows:

config.after_initialize do
  begin
    require 'bullet'
    Bullet.enable = false
    Bullet.alert = false
    Bullet.bullet_logger = true
    Bullet.console = true
    Bullet.rails_logger = true
    Bullet.disable_browser_cache = true
    begin
      require 'ruby-growl'
      Bullet.growl = true
    rescue MissingSourceFile
    end
  rescue MissingSourceFile
  end
end
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