Last Saturday at Crossroads BJJ we covered two sequences or “flows”, one from the feet and another from the ground. A flow is essentially a Jiu-Jitsu kata that allows us to drill techniques and see one possible way that these techniques can blend together. From the feet we covered 3 techniques, an arm drag, a defense to being lifted off the ground and a kneebar. In Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling the arm drag is an extremely powerful way to get behind somebody, where you gain the ability to control them while giving them no ability to attack you. For this reason you never want somebody on your back or behind you in a fight. From this position we demonstrated how little you need to lift somebody off of the ground to be able to off balance them and bring the fight to the ground on your terms, so understanding how to not get lifted off of the ground is essential in learning self defense. Once we defended the lift we switched to attacking the leg lock/knee bar.
On the ground we covered how to stand up in somebodies guard, then we went on to cover how to stop somebody from standing up. Of course just because you know a technique does not mean you know it well enough to apply it on everybody in the gym or at a tournament. In a fight, anything can happen, if your timing is off the person may still be able to stand up in your guard and from that position you will need to know what to do. In this position with the top bjj player standing in our guard we covered a sweep and a submission for when the top player defends our sweep.
The goal of the Crossroads Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Fundamentals class is to make sure you understand the basic philosophy of brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the idea of maximum effectiveness, minimal effort. If a technique is defended successfully we do not attempt to use all of our physical strength to try and make it work, we simply switch to a more suitable technique that requires less strength to achieve. In Jiu-Jitsu we always assume that the person we are fighting is bigger, stronger and faster than us.