Next Generation Martial Arts
Thibodaux, Louisiana
A few minutes here before class to refresh your memory pays off big on the mat — use your time wisely.
Same drills as Year 1, in the same order — class opens with line drills, then movement, escape, and strike defense. The drills don't change. What changes is what you're free to do inside them.
You have the green light to hunt for an attack while the drill keeps moving — and on the other side, to feel the moment your own body is in danger. Neither of you announces it, and we won't call it out. That's the point: you build the feel for it yourself, blind to your partner, until reading the attack and the defense becomes instinct instead of instruction. Line drills stay text-only as in Year 1; movement, escape, and strike each keep their Year 1 video and gain a Year 2 freedom video.
Class follows the room. When most of the mat is in Year 1, that's what we run; when it's mostly Year 2, we run the entries. If you're in the smaller group tonight, this page is your job — show up knowing what's on the schedule and ready to add your piece to it.
We'll always make time to help you, but no one can put your reps in for you. Your progress is yours to drive.
Year 1 gave you a vocabulary — the techniques and movements, built into your body by showing up. Year 2 is about learning to train with them. The skill now isn't just doing the move; it's knowing when to add resistance and when to give it, so both of you actually improve.
Good training is two people working to make each other better — not a fight to prove who's tougher or stronger. Give your partner enough to test the technique, never so much that you turn the round into a battle. When the whole room trains this way, everybody gets better — not just the toughest people in it.
This week's entry: Butterfly Guard → 2-on-1 Passing Hub into Open Guard Top.
New hub this month, entered from butterfly guard: you fight to the 2-on-1, then pass off it. It connects back to the horse reins hub as your safety valve — if you're late to settle the 2-on-1, you fall back into horse reins (the Month 10 hub, shown as the reference video below) and pass from there instead. New material on top, the familiar hub waiting underneath.
Start slow. Slow movement, slow technique — the first job is to feel how your body has to move to make it work, not to get it done fast. Never rush: speed that costs you smoothness is costing you the skill. Only once you can move through it clean, with no trip-ups, do you add pace.
When it's smooth, ask your partner for light resistance — light movement, not a fight. The point isn't to make it harder; it's to give you a live reaction to read while you still have the time and the calm to process where to go, instead of fighting for it. Add resistance a little at a time, and what starts as a deliberate read slowly turns into feel. That patience is where real control — of yourself and of your partner — comes from.
This week's chain: 2-on-1 Passing Hub → Horse Reins Hub → control → read the Knee Stuff Pass → finish
From the settled 2-on-1, gain an underhook with one arm; with the other hand, elbow tight to your ribs, push down the knee that's across your hip line. Sprawl and point your hips the way you want to travel, weight heavy so your hip smashes that leg flat and gives no space to recover guard. Then walk your body around the leg into side control with the underhook, often settling into a head-and-arm or kesa-gatame pin.
After the knee stuff pass, players often chase you down to recover their guard. Instead of fighting it, trade the position and settle into top half guard. Most accept the trade — it feels like they've stopped the pass — but you've actually settled straight into the underhook pass from top half, finishing what they thought they'd shut down.
As you settle the 2-on-1 and hunt your pass, most players push you away and scoot their hips out to escape. Use it: as they scoot, scoop one arm under the leg that's over the outside of your hip. Then, instead of pushing that leg down, punch your other hand to the floor on the back of their knee — that turns you straight into an old-fashioned stack pass.
No race mentality. Only the next right decision, clearer the calmer you are.
Dictating the flow doesn't mean you decide it alone — your partner gets a say. Their reaction is the information: turn one way and it points you somewhere, turn the other and it points you somewhere else. Reading that and answering it is the skill. Calm down enough and you stop muscling through and start noticing the patterns; the patterns become your defaults, and your read starts running on feel instead of thought. That's the shift — you're not just collecting technique anymore, you're learning with your body. It moves where it senses it needs to be, the instinct that holds up when everything turns to chaos, because in a scramble there's no time to think, only to feel.
It's what makes a black belt feel the way they do. They've run this loop over countless mat hours until it's effortless — they aren't fighting your strength, they're borrowing your own energy to find the control and the finish. That's the destination: not more force. Just feel.
Read the full Curriculum Philosophy →