Saturday's with Junior

Excellent class on scarf hold escapes Saturday. Professor Junior added another escape to the curriculum- one that involves rotating the hips parallel with the opponents position and hooking their top leg with my bottom leg and then locking in a half guard by hooking my top leg over my bottom foot like a triangle- the idea is to remove their base by stretching them out and then bringing them over the top to reposition myself in side control. the Of course- another escape is simply not to get caught- keep your arms in close to your side so that the scarf hold can't happen and you are looking at a simple headlock escape. We also learned a submission you can use once you have a scarf hold on an opponent- this is basically a triangle applied to the arm you are holding.
When we took the methods to drill I was pretty successful at escaping. I employed each method, sometimes defaulting to an alternate method when a first attempt was unsuccessful. I also found that a lot of this same technique can be adapted to side control escapes.
Rolling at the end of class was a mixed bag of hits and misses. I did get a nice triangle sub, and some great practice escaping side control. I also got in a few good sweeps. There are a lot of new bluebelts in class now since the belt promotion on the 21st, but they are the same guys they were when they were 4-stripes, and i had some decent success rolling with them since I really believe we are performing at similar levels.