Sunday, February 13, 2011

QT with spider guard

Yeah...so I've been hearing for a long while that I'm going to be good at spider guard (people see long legs, they miss the weak grips). After working some drills at the combined levels class on Friday, I'm ready to go!

At the recommendation of Slidey and Christian, I decided to check out Braulio Estima's work on it. I...love it. I picked up the download earlier today and it already makes loads more sense. I've been looking at a lot of resources and had to choose between this and Tatsuya Onose's set. Very glad I went with this one first. I like Tatsuya's stuff, but Braulio's download is a good introduction to the principles of the position. Among other things, it covers setting up the guard, discusses efficient grips, covers a nice response to a defense and a pass and ends with a review in the form of some live sparring (a great addition to any instructional video). It runs about $11US after the conversion and was beyond worth it. I think I'll spend...a month or so playing with it. It'll be a nice break from my flailings at deep half.



Tatsuya's next...I priced it at Amazon Japan just to be sure and it came in at around $91US as opposed to $72 (with shipping) at BudoVideos, so I'll be buying the US version. I was a little worried about the idea of buying a DVD in a language I really don't understand well enough to learn in, but after watching Braulio's video (I was paying much more attention to the technique than the oral instruction), I realized that the lack of words may mean I lose some of the instruction, but I don't think too much will be lost. 

1 comment:

slideyfoot said...

Lasso grip is awesome. I'm looking forward to playing with it some more when my knee heals up, especially as it has been a while since I last watched the Braulio vid.

You'll have to do a translation of the Onose DVDs for me. ;p