A Basic Repertoire

To take grappling class at the Academy, you’ve got to have passed your intermediate requirements.  Typically, this takes between 3-6 months for most folks.  By then, you’ve learned the name of some positions and probably been exposed  to some submissions.

I say probably because up through intermediate there aren’t any required submissions in the curriculum.  So, should you wait until orange sash or purple sash, when you’ve officially learned some submissions?  If that were the case, then we’d wait till orange or purple to invite students, not intermediate.

The point of waiting till intermediate is to give people some time to get comfortable with training and to give them a little bit of exposure before doing some live rolling.  When you get to class, you’ll get shown some basic moves so that you don’t feel completely out of sorts.

Today for grappling class, at the end of our “basics” theme week, we went over the arm bar, the key lock, the rear naked choke and the calf strangle.  For those fresh to class, this gave them a repertoire to work with and for those who had been many times before, this helped tighten up any flaws in their basics.  Keep in mind, though, that learning a technique and being able to apply it against a resisting opponent are often two very different things.  To be able to apply submissions requires that  old familiar martial elbow grease – hard work over time.