Tuesday 29 October 2013

On the Mat Day 424: Berimbolo and Spiral Guard

We started class learning double leg takedowns, which was great for my back! Actually, I felt much stronger and could handle it fine. I often use duck walks during warm up and recently I have been practicing keeping my upper body upright instead of bent over during a shoot in, so this lesson was a welcome change. It is rare that we work on takedown.

During sparring I mostly went ahead and tried to get into berimbolo and spiral guard positions. These two open guard types in my mind are sort of mirror images of each other, and when I think of them like that I seem to be able to process them easier. Berimbolo from the dela Riva is quite aggressive though, whereas spiral guard (reverse dela Riva) is very defensive and has few options, namely invert under to take the back, knee bar on the far leg, or when they move their far leg away you can switch legs to pull their leg from under them. It's fun anyway, and that's all that counts.

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