Last night at class we spent most of the evening working on stand-up self defense tactics. In jiu jitsu we tend to spend most of our time fighting on the ground, either off our backs or with our weight distributed on our partner. Anytime I work on stand-up I’m reminded of how different the strength and cardio requirements are. It gets even harder when you’re standing up and pinned against the wall. And harder still when you get taken down, pinned against the wall, with your partners full weight on you and your trying to stand back up.
We started the class with out typical warm-up of hip escapes, and then quickly transitioned into pummeling drills. These drills switched to pummeling “sparring”. After warm-up we started our wall work. One person would stand with their back against the wall, the other would stand in front of them, with double underhooks and attempt to keep them pinned there. The person on the wall had the job of getting at least one underhook, and spinning their partner so that they were against the wall. Back and forth we went with that drill.
Next we started the same way, one person against the wall, while the other pinned them there and then went for a double leg, pinning the guy on the wall against the ground and the wall. The guy on the wall had to use the wall to stand back up by walking his shoulders up the wall while pushing his partner down so his partner didn’t get the takedown again.
This was exhausting, and a great workout, especially for the legs. I left class realizing that to become a complete grappler I would need to spend significant more time in situations like being pinned against a wall. That’s easy to forget when you do most of your work on a wide open mat, resetting your match anytime you get close to a barrier (a wall) or roll too close to another match that may be going on.
Here are a couple of videos that are pretty close to showing what we were working on: