active hooks active hooks active hooks

If nothing else, I'm going to take that point from tonight's scattered mat time.

(Context: butterfly guard)

although I'm also taking the point of properly angling my "up" leg -- I've long been angling it outwards, losing the ability to keep any sort of distance once my opponent starts to try and flatten me out, and it's also conceding the pass by making it even easier to push the leg down to the mat and out of their way.

And duh, switching which leg I'm hooking (theirs AND mine)

Key, key factors I'd been completely oblivious to (have I mentioned how wretched my butterfly guard is?), little aha moments that I hope turn into nice dividends in terms of progress.

While that progress has been slow, it has at least led to some opening up in my open guard. Hell, at this point I'm just tickled that I can get into open guard. So even if my butterfly guard always ends up sucking, if it can at least be annoying (or boring?) enough to allow me to move into open guards, that's okay with me too.

Actually, no it's not. I want to develop a decent butterfly guard. Not at the expense of anything else, and not as a baiting technique, nor as a transition to some other guard. It was really nice to be back for even an abbreviated and unfocused mat session. While I hated to, a few extra days' rest was probably a wiser idea than I'd like to admit.

I also felt turdish. My training partner I'd mentioned a couple posts back apologized for making me angry. I felt decidedly assesque for getting angry as much as for making someone else feel like it was their fault I got angry. Maybe I'll mellow as I enter my 40s. Probably not, but let's hope... 

Hoping to pick up a few gis from alterations tomorrow morning, and to commence with rotating them in so I can properly review them here. But I will say, I recently picked up the new backpack from www.originbjj.com and it is wonderful. There are a host of lovely pictures there, but what I would like to stress here is that this is a large backpack. To me, the pictures made it look small, but it is FAR from small. Granted, I'm not winning any slam dunk contests, but still. I was concerned that I would have to start packing way more spartan than I normally do, NAY. This bag can hack it.

I'll try and get some pictures for scaling purposes here before too long, and do a more dedicated write up. Also for their gis - I'm aiming for a progression of them, and noting improvements they've made over the 3 models I have.