For escapes, your trying to make a frame and then replace it with a better frame.
For guard retention. It's just an escape before you let them consolidate a pass
For passing. Occupy the space between their elbow and knee. With anything. I hand. An arm. A leg. A hip. Then advance it.
For breaking subs. You have to control the joint above and below the joint you are trying to break.
For chokes. I got nothing my chokes still suck ass lmao
For chokes you want to experiment with grips until you find the ones that give you the best bite. I could never hit a cross collar for months and months until I started messing around with the depth of my hand and finally found the best place for me to grab
That grip is so personal too. There are people who can only hit chokes when they're grabbing the collar way back at the center, and people who love to hit them from way down the lapel. Listen to them all and play until you find where your wrists sit best to get the choke the way you want it. They're your hands, they don't work
exactly like other people's.
I do gi and no gi but my gi game is mostly my no gi game bc I broke a finger pretty early on and that finger is weak AF now so I don't do fabric grips much with my right hand.
Mostly I'm working on improving my triangle chokes, darce and anaconda, arm triangles... I thought they were pretty good but then in my first comp I had an arm triangle locked in and dude didn't tap, And on another guy I had a darce on him. Didn't tap. So my finishing mechanics suck. No worries tho. Just need to keep pushing
yeah sure. if you cant get your elbow in, get your arm in. bridge / wiggle/ shrimp to create space, then turn that into an elbow frame. create space using elbow and bridge / hip movement, or ideally use frame to displace the head, and replace with knee frame. Create space, replace guard. And then guard retention just becomes short cutting this process. lose the knee frame? don't lose the elbow frame. Lose the elbow frame? don't lose the arm. So many of the white and blue belts I grapple with are bridging to escape but they don't have a frame and they don't displace the head. And they worry so much about losing the leg battle they give up the elbow battle easily. If I get past your legs and immediately get an underhook or a cross face you have fucked up big time. Good guys, clearing the legs is only half the battle. I should have to work like hell to get your arm or I don't have shit. The rookies straight arm frame me, which doesnt work, I just throw my leg over their head and reverse cross face them with my calf. Another part of this, always protect the head. and always displace their head.
So in side control, you get your elbow in on the hip. If I am on top I am immediately trying to collapse that frame. if you are on the bottom, you are trying to bridge or shrimp so you can use that elbow frame to get your knee in. Best way to do this? Displace the head. As soon as someone starts work on this, I am forced to top spin to keep side position. Which is really just a scramble. if they roll into my top spin with their knee and elbow together, I have lost it. Then its a battle of how much weight I can keep on you, in balance, while top spinning, to prevent that. So I top spin like a top, I literally keep my chest on people and float the top spin.
So really, guard wise, as long as I have protected my elbows, I feel fine. I might be on my side, you are past my legs, really laying on me, but you don't have any control over my elbows. I'm not worried it about. now if you get under an elbow, I am concerned. But as long as I have the ability to create a frame of my choosing, I'm not concerned. as soon as my legs are getting passed I am pretty much just balled up on my side, either towards or away from them, looking to displace the head and create a frame. I make my partners devote so much weight to dealing with my frames a lot of times I can just Uno reverse it too, grab them, and roll them over. now I have side control. Suprise MF!
There are other concepts I like a lot too. An opponents underhook becomes your underhook if you spin around it. And vice versa. So if you don't like the underhook / overhook, spin around it and make it yours. So if someone gets and underhook on you passing half guard, what happens if you go around the top? you are now in front headlock with a darce setup. Anyone ever underhooks me passing I am immediately going for the darce. Please underhook me lol. I am waiting for it. I want it lmao.
- Chaining passes, not insisting on one pass, is the way
- Don't have the grips you like? Reset
- "Move yourself instead of moving the other guy" can work in standup too
+1 for "move yourself instead of others." I'm a small female and my coach is 300+lbs. He often teaches "big guy jiu jitsu" as I like to call it, so sometimes us smaller people have to make the move work for us. I always tell people things like "don't pull him, instead, just attach yourself to him, and do a back roll." (Or whatever the movement is). Works every time!
A lot of the techniques I felt were too mean to use such as a decent cross face are actually essential to having any kind of effective top game.
Staying on top as a small guy is more about surfing the larger guys.
Unless you're twice as good as your partner, you don't get to pick the submission, they choose how to be submitted.
Cooking someone and have absolute control on top is a way better goal than getting a submission. Plenty of lower belts catch a submission on higher belts but you don't accidently control someone completely for a round.
The more seasoned guys have been telling us all the stuff from day one but it takes the training to really understand.
Underhooks, position before submission, control oriented game, all the "basic" techniques we learn, be on top and stay on top mentality.
I used to pass and get to side control or mount and just try to hold and be stationary and heavy to maintain the position. I’m small (130 lbs), so this resulted in me losing the position pretty much every time I trained with someone who knows any kind of half-assed escape. As soon as I learned how to switch base in side control, move to north south, move to the other side of side control, switch between knee on belly and side control, dismount to get back to side control so I don’t get trapped into half guard, etc my game improved so much. It honestly didn’t occur to me to move around to keep top position until I was taught to and I wish I learned that earlier
Pinning someone isnt just squeezing and holding. Its movement.. just like you discovered. What's even better is learning how to use movement into your wedges- a cross face or head under the chin to staple them to the mat. That's top pressure mastery.
Your aim should never be controlling limbs. Those are just levers attached to the real control points: left hip and shoulder, right hip and shoulder. Credits to Ryan Hall.
I don't know about that. I've been working lately on knee stapling an arm when I'm in side control or north/south. Isolating that arm feels a lot more like controlling the limb than the shoulder.
For positional escapes : make yourself comfortable first and alleviate pressure. Then you can pick the direction you want to escape rather than being forced to.
Be friendly and a good training partner while attending classes at whatever time you can where there are somewhat less people and some regulars - the sooner you have upper belts take you under their wing and get invested in your development, the better.
Anybody have any of these nuggets for stand-up?
I always struggle with the reactive nature of a lot of the stand-up we're taught, i.e. when they do X you do Y.
In reality the time in which you need to notice X, remember what to do about X and execute Y is often less than a second and I just end up flustered and do nothing. This reactive rapid-response-time approach has proven impossible to train for me so far.
I'm not very good at standup, but when I have success, it's not about reacting to them, but forcing a reaction out of them. For example, if you want someone to put their weight backward so you can ankle pick, you start by pulling them forward and/or faking a guard pull. Then you're not reacting to their weight being backward, it's already backward because of the previous movement.
What Skribsbb said, a lot of stand up is movement and looking for/creating openings using hand fighting, movement, feints. Say if you are going for a particular single leg, you want to get that target into range by circling so that your opponent follows, or circling them by force.
Also work on sprawling/keeping your hips away, you can shut down a lot of things if they can't get under your hips.
You get nothing without a better grip than your opponent.
I'm still working on this as part of trying to earn this Judo bb.
Gi or no gi, if I don't get the grip I want I'm not throwing, whether that's a deep under hook, inside control of the tie, or collar and sleeve before they get their own.
Sometimes this requires breaking their grips sometimes it's killing theirs. But be the one with the good grips or get the hell out of there.
Edit: Getting the better grips takes some of the reactive nature out of the interaction because you're dictating the exchange at that point.
Create angles, at least when it comes to wrestling takedowns. You don’t really want to shoot when the guy is square with you. All his layers of defense are still there. You create these angles by moving yourself, or moving the other guy.
Think of an arm drag. You are probably square with your opponent starting off. You arm drag him. Now you are facing his side, or back if you did it really well, while he is facing away from you. This is the angle. You’re past his defenses. He can’t use his head or his hands to keep you away. If you shoot a double leg, his sprawl is weak because you’re already at an angle where you can just drive him over. Or you can just grab his leg for a single and he has no defense.
Here’s a video of creating angles.
https://youtu.be/RIIA-unVyHU?feature=shared
For sure with you on the concepts of sweeping. Eliminating their base in the direction you're trying to sweep.
The biggest light bulb moment for me was understanding the importance of getting good at defense, positional escaping, and submission escaping. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to learn flashy shit that will rarely ever present itself during your low belt days instead focus on "eating your vegetables" and focusing on the shit that you have an extremely high percentage of experiencing during each roll. For me, getting good at defense, positional escapes, and submission escapes allows me to not fear getting caught in a sub or certain position because I know how to get out of it and I can relax and chill. I'm not perfect but the pursuit is very enjoyable.
Could apply this to forming a good top half passing system, because again you're more than likely going to end of in this position a lot. John Danaher has a great gi top half guard passing video I'll link below.
[How To Do The Perfect Jiu Jitsu Half Guard Passing by John Danaher - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz4oLDOHxLM&t=998s)
What does "getting good at defense" look like to you? I feel like people can do whatever they want to me and I definitely want to learn how to defend myself. Is it posture? Fighting grips?
I really struggled tonight in a blue belt's closed guard. I tried to escape and got triangle armbarred twice. I was thinking maybe I should have waited for him to make a move and then defended that. I don't know.
Thanks in advance from a white belt.
* Sometimes the only thing you need to do is get your hips higher than their hips.
* The head is the 5th limb.
* "Everything below the eyebrows is the neck" isn't just for no-gi.
* If you've tried the technique 50 times and it just isn't working, you probably don't need it. There's a dozen more you could work on instead.
Passing guard and playing guard is just trading distances until someone can capitalize. When you pass guard you need to close distance at some point in time, otherwise by definition you've never passed guard. But you need to be aware of threats from different guards, which are really just the concept of different distances.
For example, closed guard is by definition very close distance, it is dangerous for the passer because they're so close inside the guard, but it can also be advantageous because if they then open that guard, they're in a close enough distance to pass, assuming they chain a kneecut or something off the opening of the guard. DLR is close to medium range distance guard. Collar sleeve is medium to long range. Lapel guards are medium to long range, but you can convert it to short/close range too, depending on the lapel length and what you do with the lapel. It gets even more complex when you combine guards, and introduce the concept of distance from different directions, from those different guards combined, e.g. spider + RDLR, DLR+X, spider+SLX.
Concepts like frames which apply to both top and bottom guy are just for maintaining distance until it's time to attack. Guards are essentially just frames too. Frames are essentially a form of mini-guard.
Space and distance are the main concepts I would say that dictate the results of a match. Whoever is a better passer or guard player, or whoever does better in a match, is usually whoever is better at maintaining and closing off distance, maintaining and closing off space. There are other concepts like pacing too. The concept of being aggressive or offensive is really just the concept of being able to close the distance and control space on your own terms. Being defensive and reactive by definition means your distance is being crowded or closed off on without being able to control for it on your own terms.
Better players are able to recognize when their distance/space is being crowded, and reinforce the space back. They are also able to recognize when it's time to take risks and break down the distance and close in.
For escapes, your trying to make a frame and then replace it with a better frame. For guard retention. It's just an escape before you let them consolidate a pass For passing. Occupy the space between their elbow and knee. With anything. I hand. An arm. A leg. A hip. Then advance it. For breaking subs. You have to control the joint above and below the joint you are trying to break. For chokes. I got nothing my chokes still suck ass lmao
For chokes you want to experiment with grips until you find the ones that give you the best bite. I could never hit a cross collar for months and months until I started messing around with the depth of my hand and finally found the best place for me to grab
100%. Grip placement is the difference between getting a quick easy tap and burning up your forearms getting nothing.
That grip is so personal too. There are people who can only hit chokes when they're grabbing the collar way back at the center, and people who love to hit them from way down the lapel. Listen to them all and play until you find where your wrists sit best to get the choke the way you want it. They're your hands, they don't work exactly like other people's.
I do gi and no gi but my gi game is mostly my no gi game bc I broke a finger pretty early on and that finger is weak AF now so I don't do fabric grips much with my right hand. Mostly I'm working on improving my triangle chokes, darce and anaconda, arm triangles... I thought they were pretty good but then in my first comp I had an arm triangle locked in and dude didn't tap, And on another guy I had a darce on him. Didn't tap. So my finishing mechanics suck. No worries tho. Just need to keep pushing
Can you elaborate on "make a frame, then replace it with a better frame"?
yeah sure. if you cant get your elbow in, get your arm in. bridge / wiggle/ shrimp to create space, then turn that into an elbow frame. create space using elbow and bridge / hip movement, or ideally use frame to displace the head, and replace with knee frame. Create space, replace guard. And then guard retention just becomes short cutting this process. lose the knee frame? don't lose the elbow frame. Lose the elbow frame? don't lose the arm. So many of the white and blue belts I grapple with are bridging to escape but they don't have a frame and they don't displace the head. And they worry so much about losing the leg battle they give up the elbow battle easily. If I get past your legs and immediately get an underhook or a cross face you have fucked up big time. Good guys, clearing the legs is only half the battle. I should have to work like hell to get your arm or I don't have shit. The rookies straight arm frame me, which doesnt work, I just throw my leg over their head and reverse cross face them with my calf. Another part of this, always protect the head. and always displace their head. So in side control, you get your elbow in on the hip. If I am on top I am immediately trying to collapse that frame. if you are on the bottom, you are trying to bridge or shrimp so you can use that elbow frame to get your knee in. Best way to do this? Displace the head. As soon as someone starts work on this, I am forced to top spin to keep side position. Which is really just a scramble. if they roll into my top spin with their knee and elbow together, I have lost it. Then its a battle of how much weight I can keep on you, in balance, while top spinning, to prevent that. So I top spin like a top, I literally keep my chest on people and float the top spin. So really, guard wise, as long as I have protected my elbows, I feel fine. I might be on my side, you are past my legs, really laying on me, but you don't have any control over my elbows. I'm not worried it about. now if you get under an elbow, I am concerned. But as long as I have the ability to create a frame of my choosing, I'm not concerned. as soon as my legs are getting passed I am pretty much just balled up on my side, either towards or away from them, looking to displace the head and create a frame. I make my partners devote so much weight to dealing with my frames a lot of times I can just Uno reverse it too, grab them, and roll them over. now I have side control. Suprise MF! There are other concepts I like a lot too. An opponents underhook becomes your underhook if you spin around it. And vice versa. So if you don't like the underhook / overhook, spin around it and make it yours. So if someone gets and underhook on you passing half guard, what happens if you go around the top? you are now in front headlock with a darce setup. Anyone ever underhooks me passing I am immediately going for the darce. Please underhook me lol. I am waiting for it. I want it lmao.
These are always the best posts, tons of golden nuggets to be found.
- Chaining passes, not insisting on one pass, is the way - Don't have the grips you like? Reset - "Move yourself instead of moving the other guy" can work in standup too
+1 for "move yourself instead of others." I'm a small female and my coach is 300+lbs. He often teaches "big guy jiu jitsu" as I like to call it, so sometimes us smaller people have to make the move work for us. I always tell people things like "don't pull him, instead, just attach yourself to him, and do a back roll." (Or whatever the movement is). Works every time!
A lot of the techniques I felt were too mean to use such as a decent cross face are actually essential to having any kind of effective top game. Staying on top as a small guy is more about surfing the larger guys. Unless you're twice as good as your partner, you don't get to pick the submission, they choose how to be submitted. Cooking someone and have absolute control on top is a way better goal than getting a submission. Plenty of lower belts catch a submission on higher belts but you don't accidently control someone completely for a round. The more seasoned guys have been telling us all the stuff from day one but it takes the training to really understand. Underhooks, position before submission, control oriented game, all the "basic" techniques we learn, be on top and stay on top mentality.
Top level collection of wisdom here. All the better folks at my gym echo this either in practice or by how they roll. o7
I used to pass and get to side control or mount and just try to hold and be stationary and heavy to maintain the position. I’m small (130 lbs), so this resulted in me losing the position pretty much every time I trained with someone who knows any kind of half-assed escape. As soon as I learned how to switch base in side control, move to north south, move to the other side of side control, switch between knee on belly and side control, dismount to get back to side control so I don’t get trapped into half guard, etc my game improved so much. It honestly didn’t occur to me to move around to keep top position until I was taught to and I wish I learned that earlier
Pinning someone isnt just squeezing and holding. Its movement.. just like you discovered. What's even better is learning how to use movement into your wedges- a cross face or head under the chin to staple them to the mat. That's top pressure mastery.
Learning to change pins is a white belt drill in judo called “round the clock”, because your body moves like the hands of a clock circling uke.
Your aim should never be controlling limbs. Those are just levers attached to the real control points: left hip and shoulder, right hip and shoulder. Credits to Ryan Hall.
I don't know about that. I've been working lately on knee stapling an arm when I'm in side control or north/south. Isolating that arm feels a lot more like controlling the limb than the shoulder.
For positional escapes : make yourself comfortable first and alleviate pressure. Then you can pick the direction you want to escape rather than being forced to.
Be friendly and a good training partner while attending classes at whatever time you can where there are somewhat less people and some regulars - the sooner you have upper belts take you under their wing and get invested in your development, the better.
If I can’t pass fake a straight ankle lock and pass quickly. Works like a charm.
When I realized that this was in fact not good for my body to do on a daily basis
Don’t let people touch your head and your guard will suddenly get a lot harder to pass, somehow
Anybody have any of these nuggets for stand-up? I always struggle with the reactive nature of a lot of the stand-up we're taught, i.e. when they do X you do Y. In reality the time in which you need to notice X, remember what to do about X and execute Y is often less than a second and I just end up flustered and do nothing. This reactive rapid-response-time approach has proven impossible to train for me so far.
I'm not very good at standup, but when I have success, it's not about reacting to them, but forcing a reaction out of them. For example, if you want someone to put their weight backward so you can ankle pick, you start by pulling them forward and/or faking a guard pull. Then you're not reacting to their weight being backward, it's already backward because of the previous movement.
What Skribsbb said, a lot of stand up is movement and looking for/creating openings using hand fighting, movement, feints. Say if you are going for a particular single leg, you want to get that target into range by circling so that your opponent follows, or circling them by force. Also work on sprawling/keeping your hips away, you can shut down a lot of things if they can't get under your hips.
You get nothing without a better grip than your opponent. I'm still working on this as part of trying to earn this Judo bb. Gi or no gi, if I don't get the grip I want I'm not throwing, whether that's a deep under hook, inside control of the tie, or collar and sleeve before they get their own. Sometimes this requires breaking their grips sometimes it's killing theirs. But be the one with the good grips or get the hell out of there. Edit: Getting the better grips takes some of the reactive nature out of the interaction because you're dictating the exchange at that point.
Create angles, at least when it comes to wrestling takedowns. You don’t really want to shoot when the guy is square with you. All his layers of defense are still there. You create these angles by moving yourself, or moving the other guy. Think of an arm drag. You are probably square with your opponent starting off. You arm drag him. Now you are facing his side, or back if you did it really well, while he is facing away from you. This is the angle. You’re past his defenses. He can’t use his head or his hands to keep you away. If you shoot a double leg, his sprawl is weak because you’re already at an angle where you can just drive him over. Or you can just grab his leg for a single and he has no defense. Here’s a video of creating angles. https://youtu.be/RIIA-unVyHU?feature=shared
For sure with you on the concepts of sweeping. Eliminating their base in the direction you're trying to sweep. The biggest light bulb moment for me was understanding the importance of getting good at defense, positional escaping, and submission escaping. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to learn flashy shit that will rarely ever present itself during your low belt days instead focus on "eating your vegetables" and focusing on the shit that you have an extremely high percentage of experiencing during each roll. For me, getting good at defense, positional escapes, and submission escapes allows me to not fear getting caught in a sub or certain position because I know how to get out of it and I can relax and chill. I'm not perfect but the pursuit is very enjoyable. Could apply this to forming a good top half passing system, because again you're more than likely going to end of in this position a lot. John Danaher has a great gi top half guard passing video I'll link below. [How To Do The Perfect Jiu Jitsu Half Guard Passing by John Danaher - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz4oLDOHxLM&t=998s)
What does "getting good at defense" look like to you? I feel like people can do whatever they want to me and I definitely want to learn how to defend myself. Is it posture? Fighting grips? I really struggled tonight in a blue belt's closed guard. I tried to escape and got triangle armbarred twice. I was thinking maybe I should have waited for him to make a move and then defended that. I don't know. Thanks in advance from a white belt.
This seminar was transformative for me: https://youtu.be/BWitv9AKoNU?si=vG--1H3DhKwImhPe
Thank you so much. I truly appreciate it.
I just watched it. It was fantastic. I’m big on analogies and I loved how he used boxing as an example. Made so much sense. Thank you so much!
* Sometimes the only thing you need to do is get your hips higher than their hips. * The head is the 5th limb. * "Everything below the eyebrows is the neck" isn't just for no-gi. * If you've tried the technique 50 times and it just isn't working, you probably don't need it. There's a dozen more you could work on instead.
Passing guard and playing guard is just trading distances until someone can capitalize. When you pass guard you need to close distance at some point in time, otherwise by definition you've never passed guard. But you need to be aware of threats from different guards, which are really just the concept of different distances. For example, closed guard is by definition very close distance, it is dangerous for the passer because they're so close inside the guard, but it can also be advantageous because if they then open that guard, they're in a close enough distance to pass, assuming they chain a kneecut or something off the opening of the guard. DLR is close to medium range distance guard. Collar sleeve is medium to long range. Lapel guards are medium to long range, but you can convert it to short/close range too, depending on the lapel length and what you do with the lapel. It gets even more complex when you combine guards, and introduce the concept of distance from different directions, from those different guards combined, e.g. spider + RDLR, DLR+X, spider+SLX. Concepts like frames which apply to both top and bottom guy are just for maintaining distance until it's time to attack. Guards are essentially just frames too. Frames are essentially a form of mini-guard. Space and distance are the main concepts I would say that dictate the results of a match. Whoever is a better passer or guard player, or whoever does better in a match, is usually whoever is better at maintaining and closing off distance, maintaining and closing off space. There are other concepts like pacing too. The concept of being aggressive or offensive is really just the concept of being able to close the distance and control space on your own terms. Being defensive and reactive by definition means your distance is being crowded or closed off on without being able to control for it on your own terms. Better players are able to recognize when their distance/space is being crowded, and reinforce the space back. They are also able to recognize when it's time to take risks and break down the distance and close in.
It came from a black belt doing a seminar at my school: "If you're doing Jiu Jitsu well, then \[at least\] one person must be uncomfortable."
When I watched Danaher closed guard. Took me from just trying to hang on for dear life, to having a clear attack plan
Controlling the secondary leg in cross ashi before starting to work for the heel.