Flower Power DVD by Malachy Friedman

This is so slick. Professor Malachy Friedman has awesome amount of jiu-jitsu smarts and he gets his points across so clearly. He sees things most of us would miss and he’s incredibly inventive. The guy is a wizard. It’s not a difficult sweep from guard, but he teaches it differently with a change-up grip that makes such an amazing difference. You just have to see this video to know that it’s not the traditional sweep. As the smaller guy, who always seems to roll with gorillas, I’m working to own this version. Professor Malachy gives all the details and cool variations, to set you up right. Good stuff. I’m grateful for the knowledge. OSS.

This is a very effective sweep, and the video gives lots of solid detail making it a very useful addition to my library, so yeah, I highly recommend Flower Power. Friedman gives the basics, of course, and then he moves to really creative variations and attacks, and everything clicks - boom, boom, boom. If you put the effort into his system, your results should turn out excellent. Even if you are not of a higher rank, you still should do well with this instruction. This appeals to me because it's a tight game, a thinking game, but doesn't require extreme athleticism which I appreciate. As the description says you get so much detail and variation. Flower Counters, Flower Armbars, Flower Triangles, Barataplata, Swede, X-Guard Sweep, Tama Flower, etc. etc. etc. As for the production, I think it's quite professional. It's not Star Wars, just solid BJJ. Everything you need to know is captured clearly, everything is high quality including the audio. That's all I want. No cowbell. I think Friedman is a genius teacher. I do. He is clear, explaining steps and sequences in a concise, no fluff way. He always explains the why of what you should do - no smoke and mirrors ever. I appreciate that. Yeah, I give it 5 stars. Absolutely.

The DVD is a little over 30m long, and something like 30% of the runtime (i'm trying to be conservative, i think it was more) is completely dead, used up by a title card that plays a little too long between every technique, and Friedman introducing every technique with redundant mumbling about how good the flower sweep is. One whole technique is used showing an entry from flower sweep into "Heisen guard," a guard no one has ever used, and you won't have any options from until you buy Friedman's Heisen guard DVD. So if you wanna go from a nearly successful flower sweep and fuck yourself into a useless position with no ideas on how to progress from there, Flower Power has you covered. There're basically one and a half good ideas on the DVD, but the detail of the instruction is roughly what you would get in a text from a buddy after he hit something cool in open mat. So here, I'll do it for you. 1st good idea: start setting up a brabo choke so that you have their open lapel outside their arm. Then set up a regular flower sweep, but instead of grabbing the sleeve, slap that lapel over their elbow at the last instant as a surprise to block the post. Here's half a good idea: transition to X or single leg X off a failed flower sweep. His method is pretty half-assed, but it's an intriguing idea to lab yourself. The rest is fancy nonsense that you be better off focusing on just improving your initial flower sweep attack.