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Foot-Locks and other Animals (diary entry)

  04.01.17   First private lesson of the year and we decided to focus on leg-locks. If there was one truth that came out of tonight for my client it was the universal appeal of foot and ankle submissions. Wherever the foot is available it is possible for a grappler to trap, isolate and hyperextend it with relatively minimum effort.     We began our session with some simple grappling orientated calisthenics. The warm-up consisted of dynamic cat-stretching, quadruped shoulder rolls, scap press-ups, Indian press-ups, Indian squats, should bridging, solo snaking/shrimping backwards and forwards, and partner snaking/shrimping. This moved onto some more partner drilling/warming up such as guard jumping exercises, guard sit-ups, horizontal guard climbing on stand partner, butterfly guard leg-press, and 60-70% specific hook guard/DLR specific sparring. Moving to the top position we did some 50-60% pin transitioning/escaping. Whilst my client moved through the pins I noticed the potential for him to easily pick up the snake-choke and so we covered this part of technical section. Next we had a look at the hook/DLR guard and some simple sweeps.  We then moved onto the straight foot-lock. We looked at three ways to execute this technique – the traditional deep lock, the rather sadistic shallow lock and the mid-range lock. The session also covered the lifter’s hold and the importance of foot positioning. We then did some semi-specific sparring with one fighter in   Leg-locks have a varied focus in the world of submission fighting. On one side of the coin we have both Eastern and Western martial arts preferring to attack the upper body with grappling holds. Some of this might come from the fact the surviving/revived/reinvented koryu (old Japanese martial arts) and the medieval/renaissance treatises of Europe had a strong bias towards controlling armed attackers, focusing on controlling arm and the head and torso (being in close proximity). Such training methods in both instances would have influenced the surviving modern schools of ju jutsu (including those that influenced judo and aikido) in Japan and the various forms of western folk wrestling (including those that influenced Greco-Roman Wrestling and bareknuckle boxing). Mainstream and sporting judo prohibit leg-locks as does Tomiki Aikido (the one major sporting form of this art), and all major styles western amateur wrestling prohibit submissions. However, on the other side of the coin we see leg-locks appearing with varying degrees of restriction in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Japanese Shoot Wrestling, British/American Catch-As-Catch-Can, Mixed Martial Arts and Russian Sambo. Sambo took caught its leg-lock ball off Catch-As-Catch-Can Wrestling and really ran with it. Today Sambo is revered as the laboratory for leg-lock submissions.   Dean Lister is an excellent go-to online resource for improving upon your leg-lock game. He has a wide amount of experience and focuses a lot on this area of fighting. His approach to a simple straight foot lock, which we worked on today, is a brilliant case in point. I have also included footage of the two great Brazilian Jiu Jitsu champions that taught me most of my submission knowledge for six years: Victor and Braulio Estima.

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