Category: Guard retention

Closed guard retention and posture breaking

Closed guard retention principles: How to develop an unpassable guard

Here are some important principles to understand for retaining closed guard against an opponent who tries to break it open, whether or the knees or standing up.

Hiking the hips up

Your opponent will try to break your guard open by putting a lot of pressure with his back against your ankles.  By moving your hips forward and up, you can move your ankles farther back, away from his back, which alleviates the pressure.

See ‘An Easy ‘Tweak’ To Make Your Closed Guard Much Harder to Pass’ by Stephan Kesting for more:

and ‘Concepts When Doing Closed Guard by Travis Stevens’

Posture breaking

In order for an opponent to break your guard open, typically they need their head to be up (although there are some exceptions such as the Sao Paulo pass).  Therefore, you want control over their head and the ability to pull it down.

Attacking the front hand

In order to keep their posture, the opponent needs a point of base on your body in front of their head.  The more forward the hand is, the more effective it is in pushing the opponent back and up.  Therefore, you need to to perform some kind of grip break or movement to get rid of the front hand, so it can’t push on you effectively.  I don’t want to get into details of all the different grip breaks you can do, since this is about core principles.

Pulling with your knees

When pulling the opponent down to break his posture, a common mistake is to rely too heavily on your arms to pull him forward.  You need to use your legs.   Use your legs in an arcing movement to pull him up and forward.  This may allow you to pull him forward even if he has a hand posted for base.  You should also pull diagonally off to one side, so that the opponent can’t use both hands equally.

Tilting and moving your hips side to side

If you think of your body as a table, your opponent is trying to put his hands on the table and push away from it. If the table is constantly tilting from side to side, his hands will slip off, allowing you to pull him forward.  You constantly should look for opportunities to scoot your hips off to one side and tilt your hips (one side up, the other side down), which will give you better opportunities for posture breaking.

Sitting up

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you can’t pull your opponent’s head down to your chest, but you can sit up, as in the hip bump sweep, to bring your chest to their head and then clinch them and bring them back down. Always look for this opportunity when the opponent has their head up.   Sometimes, as their head is coming up, you can sit up and do a hip bump sweep that will be extra effective because you’re going with their momentum.

 

Stopping the opponent from standing up

  • Lifting the hips up to put weight down into the opponent’s legs/low back.
  • Pulling in and down with the heels
  • The timing for doing it is when the top person leans forward a little when trying to stand up.
  • If the opponent manages to post one foot up, you should put all the weight towards the knee that’s still on the ground.

 

Related videos

 

FloGrappling account required: https://www.flograppling.com/video/5629183-master-class-roger-gracie-teaches-the-best-closed-guard-in-the-world

For more from me on guard retention, check my guard retention category on this blog:

http://bjjpressure.com/category/guard-retention/

De La Riva guard retention

Please take a look at my post ‘Open guard retention principles‘ for more on open guard retention.

See http://www.grapplearts.com/the-de-la-riva-guard/ for a brief introduction to De La Riva guard.

Your first stop for learning De La Riva guard retention should be this set of videos from De La Riva black belt David Morcegao:

Since some people learn better from reading than from watching videos, let’s take a look at some common approaches to passing De La Riva guard, and how to stop them.

Turning the hooked knee out

By taking the leg that the De La Riva hook is on and driving it’s knee forward and outward, the top person can loosen or pop the hook out.

To counter this, the bottom person wants to straighten that knee by pushing on the hip with the other (non De La Riva) leg to make the top person step back, then re-hooks the De La Riva.

Pushing the De La Riva hook down

See ‘BJJ Scout: Leandro Lo’s DLR Counters’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbkKiWIHZvg for more on the benefits of pushing the De La Riva hook down.

In this case, I would do the same as above, but switch grips with the right hand to pull off the hand that’s pushing your hook down:

Stuffing your free leg down

If messing with the DLR leg isn’t working, often the top person will try to stuff down the free leg and step over it, into what’s commonly known as the headquarters position [I know, the picture isn’t exactly HQ position].

Pushing the free leg down is a prerequisite for many popular DLR passes, such as the knee cut, X-pass, and side smash pass.

The counter here is to move the foot that’s being stuffed down to reinforce itself by crossing with the DLR hook in a sort of half guard.

From here, we can off balance the top person forwards by pulling/lifting with the legs and pushing their hand in:

The off balancing may end up in a sweep, or simple re-establishing DLR guard.  When he’s off balance, he can’t stuff the free leg effectively, so it can be extracted and put back on the hip.

Defending the leg drag

TODO add link to leg drag page when it’s available.

Backstep / kneebar

The backstep to kneebar or reverse half guard have long been a classic DLR counter.

A good counter is to turn the DLR hooking knee inwards, so when the top person backsteps, they end up sitting on the shin, rather than on the bottom person’s abdomen.  This leads to a sweep.


Defending against the side smash pass

Here are 2 clips from Ostap Manastyrski on stopping the side smash pass.

See also this great video by Lachlan Giles ‘Recovering De La Riva from Headquarters position’

Related:

http://bjjpressure.com/category/guard-retention/

Defending and countering the leg weave guard pass

Please take a look at my post ‘Open guard retention principles‘ for more on open guard retention.

Defending and countering the leg weave guard pass

To clarify exactly what I mean by the leg weave guard pass, see this video:

Stephan Kesting: ‘Pressure-Style Guard Pass by BJJ World Champion Rodolfo Vieira’

The key principles are:

Prevention: Don’t let your knees come together

This type of pass invariably involves the top person pinning your knees together and weaving his arms through your legs.  To prevent it, keep your knees flared out apart from each other.

At this stage, the bottom player in blue should push the shoulder with his right hand, pull his right knee in towards his chest, and flare his right knee outward.

Prevention: leg scissor

Again, we want to prevent our legs from being pinned together.  If we can’t move the right leg, then we need to move the left leg.  In order to extract it, we’re going to push into the opponent with the right knee, and pull the left knee out and establish a full open guard (as opposed to half).

The problem is that the left leg is pinned between our opponent’s knees.  So we need to push our hips forward and move our head back, to create the space to pull the left knee out.

Watch this video by Xande Ribeiro for an example of this movement.

Push the opponent’s head to the same side his legs are going

The pass works by using the passer’s head to push the bottom person’s shoulder one way, while using the leg weave to rotate the bottom person’s knees the other way.

So the bottom person’s goal should be to keep his hips and shoulders aligned, facing the same direction.  In order to do that, we can push the opponent’s head to the same side their legs are going, which will remove the rotational pressure on our shoulder.

See this video ‘Defending the leg weave pass’ by Brent Littell, for an example of this dynamic.  Note that I prefer to push the head rather than grab the sleeve, but if you just watch the body positioning, you can see that he’s keeping himself aligned.

Sit up escape

 

If all else fails, set up the Marcelo Garcia style sit up escape:

This escape is ideal for use immediately after your opponent passes your guard, since it works best when your opponent is at a low angle near your legs.  Note that the sit up escape requires you to turn your knees away from your opponent, but the leg weave pass ends with your knees pointing towards your opponent.  So, you simply set up the frame, wait until they release the leg weave with their arms and then go.

Related:

http://bjjpressure.com/category/guard-retention/

Defending against the leg on shoulder stacking smash pass

Defending against the leg on shoulder stacking smash pass

Skip ahead to about 18:00 in this video, ‘TWIBJJ Episode 98 with Roy Harris Part 2 of 2 – Roy’s favorite guard pass’ for a demonstration of the pass:

The first counter that you might think of is to go for a triangle, but against those who are good at this pass, it’s a bad idea.  The pass is deliberately designed to bait people to try to throw up a triangle.  When the bottom guy shoots his hips up in the air for a triangle, it makes it easier for the passer to lift the bottom guy’s hips up and stack him on his neck.

I would focus on a few other things.

Stop the arm under the leg from grabbing your collar or shoulder

stackpass

If you look at this still image, you can see that the top guy’s left hand is grabbing the bottom guy’s shoulder.  This helps lock him on top and can also lead to a stacking choke, demonstrated here by Simon Hayes:

In order to prevent that, on the bottom, I would immediately grab that wrist and elbow and extend my arms to push it away from me.

Get the back of your leg to their bicep instead of their shoulder

The pass is done by getting the bottom guy’s calf on the top guy’s shoulder and using the top guy’s back and hip extension through his core(center-line) to apply pressure.  If you can get your calf out to the bicep, he can’t apply nearly as much pressure because his bicep is far to the side of his core.

If you compare the images below, Cobrinha on the left has his leg on the bicep, which is better for resisting smashes than the right picture, where the leg is on the shoulder.

leg on bicepstackpass

Scoot away to the north

The goal of the stacker is to put your knees over your nose.  If you can scoot your shoulders north, that moves your nose farther away from your knees.  Ralek Gracie demonstrates that in this clip, ‘‪Ralek Gracie – Get The Triangle Everytime – BJJ Weekly Issue #099‬’:

Before you’re stacked too hard, set up an elbow push escape

Once you’re really stacked with your knees over your nose, life is miserable.  There’s a certain point at which you can tell that the passer is about to stack you.  In that case, deliberately allow your leg to pass over their head and give up side control, and immediately set up the elbow push escape.  Marcelo Garcia demonstrates that in this clip, ‘MG in Action – Elbow Push to Fireman’s Carry’:

Another take on this topic from Ryron Gracie involves doing a back roll and guard pull.  Note that he has to do it BEFORE he is stacked too badly.  ‘How to deal with the stack with Ryron Gracie’:

In this video by Inverted Gear, ‘Defending the single stack pass’, the guy in the gray gi shows a lot of the elements that I mentioned:

Related posts:

http://bjjpressure.com/defending-and-countering-the-overunder-guard-pass/

http://bjjpressure.com/category/guard-retention/

Defending and countering the over/under guard pass

Please take a look at my post ‘Open guard retention principles‘ for more on open guard retention.

Defending and countering the over/under guard pass

Here are my thoughts on defending this pass, which is one of my favorite pressure/smash passes.

The key principles are:

Control his hands

Your opponent needs to put one arm under your leg on one side, and the other arm grabbing your other leg and holding it down on the other side.  If you can control at least one of his hands, it will prevent the pass from ever starting.

Push the opponent’s head to the same side his legs are going

As we discuss in almost every guard retention post, the opponent wants to end up on side control, with his head on one side of your body and his legs on the other.  If you can push or pull his head to the same side of your body as his legs, he can’t pin you.  With the over/under pass, the opponent will put his shoulder in your stomach and his head across your body from where his legs are.  You can block his head from coming across your body to the left side of your body by using your left bicep to push his face to your right.

Be ready to defend the leg on shoulder smash pass

The over/under pass is so-called because the opponent can pass over your leg, which is the most common, and if that meets resistance, he can pass under the leg that’s on top of his arm. The Josh Vogel video that I link below addresses this issue.  Aside from the move he shows to prevent the issue, if you do start getting stacked, I’d focus on keeping the arm that’s under your leg, away from your neck, and looking for an elbow push escape.  You can see an example of this in this video by Jeff Rockwell, ‘MG Sit Up Escapes 2’ starting at about 1:00:

 

This video by Babs Olusanmokun ‘Rolled Up Episode 34 Bonus technique with Babs’ demonstrates defending the over under pass by pushing the head and using an armpit grip like a whizzer.

This video by Josh Vogel, ‘Quick over/under guard pass counter :)’ focuses on pushing the head and also addresses the threat of the leg on shoulder smash pass:

This video by Revolution BJJ ‘Over/under pass defense to crucifix’ shows pushing the head and getting up to a crucifix:

This video by Jeff Joslin, ‘Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) Technique – 2 Over/Under Guard Pass Counters’, shows head pushing and getting up similar to the one by Babs, and then a loop choke alternative:

Here’s Cobrinha ‘Miragaia Counter Sweep ~ Cobrinha BJJ & Fitness Alliance Los Angeles’:

Sometimes people teach the ‘harpoon sweep’ as a counter to the over under, as shown here:

‘Over Under Pass Counter by Diego Gamonal’:

I’m not that big a fan of this one because I think once you set the grips for it, it’s very predictable and also hard to switch to something else.  But it is certainly a legitimate move taught by a lot of good people.

Related:

http://bjjpressure.com/defending-against-the-leg-on-shoulder-stacking-smash-pass

http://bjjpressure.com/category/guard-retention/