January 24, 2005
Some Examples of Solo Drills
When solo grappling drills are used properly they can improve a grappler’s coordination, endurance, strength and speed. They can be used as part of a warmup session or to specifically improve aspects of your grappling game.
To start, let’s concentrate on one of the most fundamental solo exercises: backwards shrimping (click here to view the basic backwards shrimping drill in Quicktime video). This is a drill that should be in every grappler’s repertoire.
How many times have you heard the advice “move your hips”, whether you were escaping from a pin or trying to apply a submission? Lateral, or side-to-side, hip movement is critical to a grappler’s game, especially when playing the guard game or escaping from bad positions.
Practicing backwards shrimping (or “ebi” in Japanese) is an effective shortcut to developing efficient side-to-side hip movement. Once mastered, there are many more challenging variations of shrimping to further improve hip mobility on the ground.
An example of a more specialized solo drill is half wall spins (click here to view the half wall spin drill in Quicktime video). Intermediate and advanced guard players often end up spinning and rotating in their guard, both to prevent guard passing and to set up their own attacks. Becoming comfortable with this sort of body position and movement via a drill like half wall spins can improve mobility in the guard when it comes to sparring time.
Now spinning upside down and replacing the guard might not be part of your game – fair enough. But I guarantee that there are other solo drills you can come up with that will help you develop some aspect of your game, no matter what your game is.
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To start, let’s concentrate on one of the most fundamental solo exercises: backwards shrimping (click here to view the basic backwards shrimping drill in Quicktime video). This is a drill that should be in every grappler’s repertoire.
How many times have you heard the advice “move your hips”, whether you were escaping from a pin or trying to apply a submission? Lateral, or side-to-side, hip movement is critical to a grappler’s game, especially when playing the guard game or escaping from bad positions.
Practicing backwards shrimping (or “ebi” in Japanese) is an effective shortcut to developing efficient side-to-side hip movement. Once mastered, there are many more challenging variations of shrimping to further improve hip mobility on the ground.
An example of a more specialized solo drill is half wall spins (click here to view the half wall spin drill in Quicktime video). Intermediate and advanced guard players often end up spinning and rotating in their guard, both to prevent guard passing and to set up their own attacks. Becoming comfortable with this sort of body position and movement via a drill like half wall spins can improve mobility in the guard when it comes to sparring time.
Now spinning upside down and replacing the guard might not be part of your game – fair enough. But I guarantee that there are other solo drills you can come up with that will help you develop some aspect of your game, no matter what your game is.
Labels: training
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