Lucas Kanard's bolo instructionals makes me feel stupid and bad
Disclaimer: I am very much not into berimbolos. Like everyone from my "generation" I used to do it quite a lot during my purple belt days, in the gi, but I disliked the game of staying inverted while death gripping belts and pants until I got to the back. I was more into Rafa's style of going into a legdrag if needed.
However, I still like to watch bolo specialists doing their thing and unfortunately a lot of this stuff has been pretty difficult to pull off in nogi, especially against leglockers. Either they tended to miss the back in competition or they went against terrible people with bad leglocks. Very few guys showed interesting things (Levy of course, Kaynard and Mateusz) against good competition.
I still think the bolo game is a weird one because it tends to occupy the same place as leglocks do in a general game and getting good at berimbolos takes a lot of time better used in something else (ie leglocks, for the most part). I was always kinda frustrated to watch berimbolo "instructionals" who were obviously pretty badly done and do not adress the obvious leglock counters, including the decade old very very stupid cross ashi counters into berimbolos (from terrible cross ashi positionning and not adressing the obvious follow ups).
I was also not that impressed by Kanard's leglock instructional: good for intermediate players but nothing groundbreaking for experienced ones but I love watching the guy in competition, he has such a fresh game in the current meta and his instagram page has been so full of gems lately, on jason rau level of greatness so I bought his patreon when he said he had a bolo instructional on it... and damn.
So good. So technical. He adresses a lot of my complains on berimbolos, on leglock counters, etc... The things he shows are so technically sound. I pulled off a few berimbolos in training, against fine leglockers after watching his instructionals and everything that went wrong or difficult are situations he adresses on his instructional. I still don't think it will be a big part of my game but it has been so awesome to see someone teaching bolos at a real elite level. In the end the bolo vs leglock battle still is a battle of the knee lines but Lucas show so many little details everywhere to counter advanced techniques (and I can be a very very harsh public towards these things and have been pretty angry at some recent "leglocks instructionals" from well known guys). Everyone interesting in the modern game should take a look at his stuff, at least just to "know" what is possible. Becoming good at this is probably a big commitment and at some point I think people have to specialize a bit into techniques occuring in the same space of the game graph but it's always good to be open minded, at least to play around with it in training and understanding it better against real specialists of the craft.
And all of this for the price of a Patreon? seriously, it's really good.
So good job Lucas and I hope he will continue to show awesome stuff in competitions and instructionals