Brandon has been helping me lately to define some focal points for my training. The idea is to pick one technique / position from top, bottom and standing that I want to focus on for the next 3 to 4 months, and make those techniques the focus of my training and drills.

Mount fascinates me right now, so that’s what I decided to work on. I always thought my mount sucked…but for some reason over the last several months it’s improved a lot. I never focused on it intentionally, but all the Roger Gracie YouTube clips must be rubbing off because I feel much more confident in this position of late.

More than that, the fact that I felt helpless in mount has bothered me and probably driven me to think about it more during training. It’s been my weakest position to date, and that has made me determined to make it my strongest position.

Goal-setting has never been a big priority for me, but Brandon is walking me through it patiently. He just won at NAGA and his whole training regimen is set up using goals. I held an interview with him on the subject that should be coming out (in article form) on The Fightworks Podcast one of these days – all about how to set goals to improve your grappling. Really, really awesome stuff. I’ll let you know when it’s posted so you can check it out.

Here’s the basic breakdown of my January – April goals:

From the top, my primary goal will be to obtain and hold mount. Secondary goals are to finish with either a cross-collar or ezekiel choke.

From the bottom, I’ll be rockin’ the elbow/leg pick to half-guard/upa combination escapes.

For guard passing, I’m going a completely different direction than what I’m used to. The “Guard Pass From Hell” video on Christian’s blog has intrigued me for a while now. I’d like to incorporate more of the Greco-roman “angles” principles into my guard passing, so my guard passes will be Aedma’s guard pass and the “Hail Mary,” a standing guard pass that uses the same pressure / angle principles.

My standup game focus will be setups that lead to sumi gaeshi Finish Reading…

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Earlier this year when I was training for the Pans, a new guy named Eric started coming to morning classes. He was an experienced high school and college wrestler who was interested in learning grappling for MMA.

The thing that really impressed me about Eric was how hard it was to keep that dude on his back. It’s what you’d expect from a wrestler, right? In particular, he had very powerful arches that made it dang hard to stay mounted in any form. While I bridge onto my feet and shoulders, Eric would bridge clear up onto the back of his head.

Bridging with your head makes sweeps that involve bridging more powerful and harder to counter – not to mention if you can bridge like that people will feel like they’re sitting on a wild bull when they try and mount you.

Problem is it takes some serious neck strength to arch like that, especially when someone is on top of you. For me, a guy with a pencil-thin giraffe neck, it’s REALLY hard. I’ve started doing some basic neck-strengthening exercises during my regular workouts. To take it to the next level, I asked Brandon Ruiz, a Machado black belt and All-American Wrestler for some good neck strengthening drills. Brandon is also the 2010 Pancrase Submission Grappling World Heavyweight Champion. A very tough guy.

He’s also a nice guy and a great instructor:

I did a little searching on YouTube and found some supplementary videos. Finish Reading…

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