Another great Noon-Jitsu class in the books! This afternoon we covered a flow drill focused around breaking the closed guard, long stepping to side control, taking mount, elbow escaping and the flower sweep. The great part about putting a flow drill together is that you gain the ability to put each of the techniques we covered in context. Often times techniques are drilled by themselves and this can make it difficult to understand when to apply the technique under pressure. Flow drills also give the person not doing the technique the opportunity to practice moving from offense positions and the offense mindset to a defensive position/mindset.
Each position on the ground has its own set of rules, things you can do and things you can not. if you do not understand this then you will be caught out of position and be easily controlled and submitted when you are in defense positions such as the bottom of mount or the bottom of side control. This afternoons bjj class featured an example of this, when you have been swept but before you have been mounted this is when you must retract your arms and move them close to your body so that you are not mounted with your arms open to attack. if you retract your arms at the right moment you become very difficult to control and are already ready to escape the position. In Jiu-Jitsu and in martial arts moving at the right moment is key to being successful and todays flow drill allowed the students of Crossroads BJJ to practice this idea repeatedly taking one step closer to having the bjj technique engrained in their muscle memory.