Passing the Guard

Worked some butterfly guard passes today, which was fun since I haven't worked with butterfly guard hardly at all. I experiment with it in grappling sometimes with limited success. ;) We did two passes. The first one involved basically doing a cartwheel over the person, using your shoulder against their abs. The other one involved passing one of the legs on the outside, sitting out and moving into side control.

Enjoyed it, but didn't get to practice it a lot. There was a new girl that came to class today and I ended up being her crash test dummy for most of the drilling time. Really liked her. I think she will be someone who will stick with it, because she is really motivated and isn't gun shy about trying anything. Hope she keeps coming back.

When we started rolling, I went with one of the blue belts. My friend Phil was watching me and made the accurate comment that I rely to heavily on my guard game. Shocking, I know. He challenged me to not pull guard at all during my next grapple.
I went with a fellow white belt. It was really hard! I didn't realize how much of a habit I had made out of falling back into guard. I took side control a couple of times, but got caught in half guard when I tried to go to mount.

I got out of half guard a couple of times, but the third time ended up on the bottom in half guard. My instinct was to free my leg and return to guard. That is what I normally do in that situation. Or, if I can't free my leg, I try to sweep or take the person's back. Unfortunately, the person I was grappling with had a solid base and my only two options were to take her back or pull guard. The side that I could have taken her back on was right next to the wall. Literally. I couldn't go that way. So my only option was to try to pull guard, but I didn't want to do that. Oh well. Pulling guard isn't horrible. I just need to work on doing other things as well.