My second round of doing this lesson, and it went a lot more smoothly than the first time. I usually have some issues with my footwork in regards to establishing clinches and doing takedowns, more so when it's orthodox stance (I'm right handed) vs south paw, but the footwork made a bit more sense this time. For this one at least (establishing the clinch), you take a big step forward with your lead leg to close the distance and make contact with your 'helmet' (arms up protecting your face/head) to their chest, and then you take a follow up step with your rear leg to establish hip-to-hip closeness/contact, and kind of straddle their leg on the side that your rear leg stepped around, while simultaneously establishing a thumbless grip behind their back - the arm (wrist) wrapping around behind their back gets gripped by the one coming from the front side.
No matter how many times I get taught/shown the steps of the rear naked choke, there are always additional technical details which stand out to me which I have prevously been neglecting. It seems like there are almost infinite ways of making it more technical, increasing the leverage, making it come on faster, making it more inescapable, setting it up faster, and so on, it's awesome! So in some ways, I feel like I know how to do this technique, and in other ways, I feel I like do it with a technical proficiency not dissimilar to a drunk caveman attempting an Olympic figure skating performance. But I enjoy it nonetheless. The take the back from the mount, followed by strong side and weak side RNC's was good though, we got that sequence flowing pretty nicely by the end. This lesson was the first opportunity I had to leap at the chance to partner up with someone who hadn't done the lesson yet, and I'd only done it once myself, but it was cool seeing someone put it all together for the very first time.
My posts are pretty dry and boring without photos attached, but there's not always something to take a photo of to add to every post. But this time, I've attached a photo of my Combatives curriculum card, to show the structure of the Combatives curriculum, and also where I'm up to at this point. It's a brilliant curriculum, and flows in numerical order from start to finish and then repeats. The goal is to do each lesson at least 3 times, and I think each Reflex Development class either twice or three times, I can't quite remember that detail. You can begin attending the RD classes after you've completed each of the Combatives lessons at least twice. Once you've done all of that, you can test for your Combatives belt if you feel competent to do so. As you can also see on the right hand side there, white belt stripes are given out after you've completed blocks of 20 classes. So you will have completed 80 classes upon recieving your fourth white belt stripe, and 3 cycles of the 23 Combatives class curriculum = 69 classes, so it's not that you cease attending Combatives classes once you complete the 69 or 80 classes, but those are the bare minimum you need to attend, on top of 2 - 3 cycles of RD classes before you can even consider testing for a Combatives belt. But nonetheless, there are always plenty of Combatives belts, and up to 4 stripe blue belts in the Combatives classes I've been attending, which I think is really cool. I guess you can, and should, never stop learning the basics.
Cheers,
- David.