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Old 02-16-2012, 09:07 AM   #29
Lee Salzman
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 406
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Re: Aikido, Rickson Gracie and Connection

Quote:
Josh Lerner wrote: View Post
Or your attempts will be successfull on someone without any internal baseline skills, yet still backfire. I was training in BJJ a few weeks ago, on my back, with my left leg up in the air. My training partner was on his knees grasping my leg from the underside of it, kneeling with his left knee on the inside of my right thigh. He was trying to straighten my leg and do a knee bar, but it was relatively simple for me to transfer the force he was applying to my leg back through his frame and back into the ground. So in terms of my left leg, I felt totally safe.

The problem was that, due to our relative positions, the force that I was so skillfully sending back through him into the ground was getting redirected down into the ground through the knee (and it was a very pointy knee) that was on my inner thigh. I couldn't squirm out of it without damaging something, so I tapped. I think that is called winning the battle but losing the war.

Come to think of it, that seems to be a running theme in my attempts at using internal skills in grappling.

Josh
It's more than a running theme, I think. You lost the war because you tried to win the battle.

I seem to regularly lose against training partners who are both less practiced grapplers and less practiced at jin and other qualities, if only because while I am wasting what little concentration I've got during a grappling session on trying to practice those qualities AND submit the other guy, they're just more worrying about how to submit me. By that, I mean, they're doing the same training as me, just less of it, and with less supervision. And sadly, about 7 times out of 10, I lose. So much for seniority.

The submissions themselves just get harder the 'better' you try to do them. You can do a guillotine choke, or you can do a guillotine choke with jin. A standard issue guillotine choke is easier, but ultimately more limited, due to being isolated movement. A guillotine choke with jin is damned near impossible to pull off without getting right pathways of connection through the upper body... and therefor, I rarely ever pull it off during sparring yet.

It seems in the short run adding more complexity to it just makes us suck all that much worse, and take that much longer to improve, at the actual end product, grappling skill.
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