Sore shoulders and a sore neck

Moving on steadily into this week’s lessons on the application of the Kimora arm-lock, Professor had designs on teaching us this move when you have your assailant within your guard and the options that are available to you.

We started of with a recap of the positions we learnt from the previous lesson and drilled those to reacquaint ourselves.

Professor then explained the execution of the arm-lock when in the guard, again it does depend on what your assailant is doing in reaction to the position you have them in. Ideally, it’s best to apply the Kimura when the assailant has their hands on the floor. This gives the opportunity to place your hand on their wrist. The timing for doing this is when the assailant tries to sit up, at this point you allow them to pick you up as well.

Once you’re in a seated position, reach over the shoulder and thread your arm between their body and arm to grab your own wrist.

Then it’s a shoulder and hip movement exercise to bring the assailant back to the floor with your legs crossed.

At this point it’s a question of applying pressure until they submit or get their arm broken!

We practiced this a few times and took time out to understand any troubles we were having, my personal gripe was that I had the arm too far away from my own body, which made the execution a little loose. But after a few adjustments it improved.

Moving on, Professor put in a scenario if the person you’re trying to arm-lock is resisting, what are the options? again questions went out and as usual Professor put us out of our misery.

He explained that we can still wrap the intended arm with the one that is used to go through their arm and grab our own wrist. But instead of grabbing our own wrist it hooks on the back of the assailant’s arm. We then move the hand that was on their wrist and use it to support ourselves. Once stable, we can then do a hip bump forwards and roll them round so that they are on the ground and we obtain a cross body position over them whilst still having the arm partially locked up.

We practiced this a few times inclusive of moving round the assailant’s head to execute the Kimura finish.

Professor then went on to show us a potential early escape for the arm-lock from this position, he explained by just moving our head forwards, we can make it difficult for them to move their arm around to get the initial grip on the Kimura.

However, Professor also explained that there’s a potentially nasty counter that can be applied instead, which he named the ‘loop choke’.

We practiced the escape and counter a few times. I struggled initially with the choke but then, with help from the Professor and other students on the evening, i was making fundamental mistakes, which I have now corrected.

This brought the lesson to a close.

My thoughts, some very nice details handed over this evening, which allows another attack to watch out for if I’m in someone’s guard or another attack to attempt if they’re in my guard. Only downside is that now people know another choke, which isn’t my strong point whilst defending.

“Tapping out”