Guard Passing - Brabo & Knee-Bars (diary entry)

27.11.2017   The penultimate lesson of the CCMA 10 hour course on basic submission grappling/ground-fighting for cross training in the martial arts brought up to the nine hour point. Here we revised the leg submissions from the guard, covered in the previous lesson, and focused on passing the guard. Tonight’s lesson brings us full circle by moving into the pinning positions again.   The warm-up consisted mainly of groundwork crawls. These are a collection of static and travelling callisthenic exercises that are relevant to both the top and underneath positions in ground-fighting. Then we moved onto partner work and muscle memory exercises. This is where the revision came into play. Arm-bars, triangle chokes and oma platas were all performed as fluid repetition drills to build speed into the execution of the techniques.   There are three ways a person can pass the guard. They can go through, round or under a guard. We looked at going through and around the guard. The former was trained from the knees and the latter from standing. In the former we focused on going to combat base and scissor walking into reverse scarf-hold position and side control. The latter was done from a standing position, pushing one leg down, feigning and then move around the guard from the opposite side.   We also covered two new submissions. The reverse arm-triangle choke (sometimes known as the brabo) was performed from the reverse scarf-hold position. The knee-bar was covered from the stand-up guard-pass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGHsF41Bwbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2QXedtG1TM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kauFzWg6v_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JNnuwrv7zw Photography by Phil Shirley.