Grapplearts: Slaughter on the Mats

[Stephan Kesting]

Today's my BJJ sparring was a battle for survival.

Maybe you think it's because I sparred with a bunch of high-level
black belts... Sorry to disappoint you, but that's wasn't the case at
all. In fact, I was barely holding my own against blue belts with
only a couple of years experience. And they were all lighter than
me...

Let me tell you why this happened.

Yesterday I got back from 6 days of rustic living in a simple cabin
with family and friends. At the cabin - between cross-country skiing
and chopping firewood to ward off the minus 30 degree night-time
temperatures - I was thinking about Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and grappling
(surprise, surprise).

One of the BJJ-related things I was thinking about was a new guard
pass I've been working on. It's still in embryonic form, so I'm not
going to go into too much detail, but the Cole's Notes version would
be: "pin his hips to the floor with one arm, post up onto both feet,
and then circle left or right to pass the guard."

I've been experimenting with this style of guard passing for a couple
of weeks, but have ONLY used it on whitebelts and some brand-new
bluebelts. Up till now it's worked great against the relatively
unsophisticated legwork of these junior grapplers.

Today I wanted to bump it up a notch and road test it against some
more experienced opponents. So I warmed up by rolling lightly with
some whitebelts, and then went against some good blue belts and purple
belts, always starting in their guards.

Well, the most charitable interpretation is that there were mixed
results...

Sure, sometimes the guard pass worked, and sometimes I ended up with a
dominant side control position (and then went back into the guard).
Most of the time, however, I was frantically defending (and barely
escaping from) armbars, collar chokes, omo plata armlocks, triangle
chokes and guard sweeps.

Basically I was on the run for about 70% of these matches.

Strangely enough, I consider this training session a HUGE SUCESS!! By
getting my butt kicked, I learned about the vulnerabilities of this
strategy. Now I can go back to the drawing board and try to come up
with technical answers to some of the problems I encountered. Then
I'll try it out on the same guys, and maybe this time it'll work
better.

Will this guard pass eventually become 'the bomb' - once I iron out
these technical kinks?

The truth is that I have no idea. Maybe this technique will
eventually become my bread and butter guard pass, or maybe I'll drop
it off in the graveyard of stupid BJJ ideas. I've had a lot of ideas
in my day, and only a small percentage of them turned out to be great
ideas.

The reason I have so much material to share in my newsletter, website
and videos IS BECAUSE I'VE MADE SO MANY MISTAKES!

So give yourself permission to make mistakes, go down blind alleys,
and try stuff that nobody thinks will work. Test your ideas, evaluate
the results, modify your ideas, and test again. As I recently asked
someone, "do you think that the very first airplane built by the
Wright Brothers actually worked?"

Have fun!

Stephan Kesting
www.grapplearts.com

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