#verbaltap

Eliot showed this variation that helped me to get the takedown and end up in side -- a place I feel pretty comfortable with in jiu-jitsu.  

The very end was me seeing that a move would finally work after all this time.  

Afterward I took a still of it and sent it on over to Eliot saying, “that’s one of the first photos of me realizing I could actually do this.” 

It was a pretty cool day.

Before I committed to this venture, I had to sit down and take an honest look at why the previous times resulted in failure.  I also had to ask myself if I really wanted to do this?

Hasn’t the modern game evolved to the point where people don’t even really care if you pull guard, I thought.

Then I remembered basically every meme in the world hates on guard pullers.  So I either better get with the program or basically quit.

At least that’s what drawings like this seem to suggest.

A post shared by Christopher Ong (@ongy84) on Dec 26, 2017 at 12:56pm PST

That’s my buddy Ongy84 (aka Christopher Ong).  He’s stupidly talented at drawing.  I yell at him a lot about how talented he is (I recently told him I have cut and paste the sentence “I hate how stupidly talented you are” just so I can save time typing it out when I see one of his insane new creations). 

He also just got his black belt.  So he’s like two times the artist I’ll ever be.  

Anyway, enough about him.  

No, my sincere interest in trying to learn wrestling is the same as it was when I attempted this the first time.  Here were the reasons I set forth then: 

I could lead a perfectly fine life pulling guard (or shit, if I got really good at leg locks, just sitting to guard and hoping some kind of magic Eddie "Wolverine" Cummings magic avails itself to me).  But I think there’s something entirely underwhelming about intentionally ignoring one of the cornerstones of the gentle art for my own progression as a martial arts practitioner.  

I have managed to go the past five years of my jiu-jitsu journey getting by on counter-wrestling, misdirection, and (what I like to call) creative sprawling, but I see my tricks getting old real fast.  Despite the better efforts of my truly amazing instructors and training partners, my efforts to improve my wrestling skills have been marginal at best.  I know that in order to even maintain level of being “passable” as I continue to rise up the ranks in BJJ, I have to evolve.

Yep, it all comes down to my silly belief we need to be well-rounded.  And it turns out that hasn’t changed one bit.

And that involves being challenged.  That brings us to...

Day 1

Over the next thirty days, I’ll go over some of the failures I experienced during the previous iterations of this experiment.  But today I’ll address one major area that I realized I needed the most help with.

Mainly, I needed a good instructor to help guide me through it.

The previous times, I had planned to just pull some of my teammates aside and ask them for pointers and to help drill some takedowns and whatnot.  Many of them were happy to help, but I realized that a great deal of trying the instruction wasn’t being as effective as possible because I didn’t have anyone specifically trying to look at my wrestling.

Sure, I had instructors who were very helpful.  But the techniques and suggestions were never isolated to just the wrestling portion.

Moreover, I didn’t want to learn the techniques the wrong way and create bad habits that a proper guide could catch along the way.

Enter: Eliot Aguayo.

During my occasional visits to 10th Planet Van Nuys, I would put in grappling rounds with my usual brand of cohorts who were getting ready to compete.  One day, my buddy Mike Frausto suggested that we all stick around for the wrestling class after the already-grueling competition class.    

When Eliot walked in and began to lead the wrestling class, he did so in the most unassuming way.  The guy is all of about a buck forty and is a scrappy MMA fighter, but aside from the great set of techniques he lined out for the guys there was something that greatly impressed me about the way he led the class.  

His patience.

Not only did he work diligently with everyone in the class (helping us all get the right techniques), he also exhibited a good-natured and positive attitude in between savage takedowns.  When I explained to him I might not be able to move a certain way, he helped me find a specific set of alternatives that seemed a little more comfortable to me.  Specifically, he showed me a version of a takedown that might be a little more helpful to me in the future.  

I was instantly a fan.  

With that, I reached out to him and asked if I could take some private classes.  He was down.  I then explained to him that I was doing this crazy 30 days of it and he seemed absolutely geeked-out by the challenge of it all.

So we began to work.  

Our first day was a natural feeling out process.  He had me do some exercises to help me with my balance and to establish a better stance.  I was 100% correct on my estimation about his patience.  The guy was extremely encouraging and helped to ease a few of the problems I was having.  

By the end of class, I told him I wanted to drill a little bit of that double leg takedown he had taught us just a couple weeks prior.  I mentioned how I had some minor success using it since.

However, when I went to try and do it during the live drills, it didn’t work.  I would hit a penetration step, break the line, attach my shoulder to the hip, but I wasn’t quite finishing.  

Eliot began to notice this as well.  He noticed that I wasn’t fully cupping the back of his legs (almost directly behind his knees).  Even when I started to correct this, though, it still wasn’t working right.  He made one small suggestion to extend my hands beyond the knees and then pull my elbows back in when I hit the ground.

Something clicked.  

Perhaps the simplest of solutions that provided a major help to an area I thought would be a significant problem.

On Day 1, we could already mark a small success off our checklist. 

That felt good.