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/

BJJ fundamental principles for every position

BJJ fundamental principles for every position

Here are some core fundamental principles that apply to most Brazilian Jiu-jitsu situations. These BJJ basics are good to keep in mind when trying to understand how and why any technique works.

Distance / space management

  • When you’re attacking, you want no space between you and your opponent.  When you’re defending, you want a lot of space.

  • When you want to move your opponent’s position relative to yours, you can move them, move yourself, or both. ‘Both’ is usually the optimal answer.  Beginners tend to try too hard to just push the other person away without moving themselves.

Awareness / decision making

You can’t be strong everywhere at the same time. At any time, certain moves will be easier to do than others based on your body positioning and the positioning of your opponent.  So this is like a game of rock, paper, scissors; deciding to do the right technique at the right time can be more important than the correctness and precision of the technique.  You have to be able to recognize where you and your opponent are strong and weak at any given moment.

  • If you put a lot of weight on your left side, your right side will be light.
  • If you stand really tall, it’s hard to snap you down, but easy to go for a shot on the legs.  If you take a very low stance, it’s hard to shoot on your legs, but easy to snap you down
  • If you’re on top of mount, if your knees are pinched tight, it’s hard for the opponent to pull guard, but easier for them to try to roll you over.  If your knees are wide, it’s hard for them to roll you over, but easier for them to pull guard.

Alignment

You want your body to be properly aligned. That means that you have symmetry between your left and right sides, and you’re not twisted or bent. If you are misaligned, the first thing that you should do is figure out how to re-align yourself. If your opponent is aligned, the first thing you should do is figure out how to misalign them.

  • Don’t get suckered in to getting stuck on any one technique or grip.  You might put your hands on the opponent’s body in a particular spot, and as they move around, if you keep your hands there, you’ll end up misaligning yourself.  In this case, let go and move them somewhere else so you stay aligned.
  • When you want to go for a sweep, you usually want to cause a tilt in your opponent’s body (one shoulder higher than the other).  If both of the opponent’s legs are on the ground, and their shoulders are tilted, then they are bent sideways in an off-balance position, and the only way for them to re-align themselves is to fall over.

  • Conversely, when you’re on top, you want to make sure your shoulders are level.

The opposite

Whatever you do to your opponent, they’re probably going to do back. For example, if you push them, they’re going to push back in order to maintain the position. Therefore, if you want to push them, you should actually pull them first. Then they’ll pull back and it will be easy to go with their energy and push them.
If someone is pushing you, you probably shouldn’t push back. That’s wasting your energy going force against force. Instead, you should go with their energy and pull them and turn to get out of their way.

Hips and legs for power

Hip extension (like when you finish an armbar) and leg extension (like doing a leg press) are the strongest movements that a human can do.   Whenever possible, use these movements.

Leverage:

  • When you want to extend or flex a joint, you should pull or push on the end of the limb.  e.g.
    • When doing an armbar, pull their arm at their hand, not on the forearm.
    • When doing a guillotine or the seatbelt from back control, grab your own hand, not your wrist.
    • When doing De La Riva guard or an ankle pick, you grab the ankle right at the heel, not higher on the calf.
    • When pulling someone’s head down for a snap down / guillotine, etc., pull at the crown of their head where they’d wear a hat, not at the neck.

Connection:

  • This is a complex topic.  See ‘SBG, & the Evolution of BJJ Instruction Rickson’s Connection Principle | SBG Video Podcast Episode 7’ for more:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGB5VSXsIXE
  • This is my take on connection.

    Imagine you want to push a heavy door open. You wouldn’t do a bench press motion with your arm to open it. Instead, you’d put your hand on the door, tense/stiffen your arm so there’s no slack, then lean forward to open it with your weight. When your core moves forward one inch, the door moves forward one inch as well, so there is a strong connection between your core and the door, through your arm. If your arm was a limp noodle, then you’d lean forward and smash your face into the door.

    When you want to move the other person, you want to figure out how to create a connection between them and your weight(if you’re on top), or between them and your hip extension or leg press type of movement (if you’re on the bottom).

    If you don’t want them to move you, then you need to remove the connection.

    In a sense this is ‘invisible’ jiu-jitsu because it’s hard to see when somebody tenses their body in the right way.

Open / closed elbow

  • You generally want your elbows to be close to your ribs, and you want your opponent’s elbows to be far away from their ribs.  When your elbow is far away from your ribs, your arm is isolated and more open to attack.  See ‘Ryan Hall The Open Elbow – Concepts, Fundamentals, Kimura & the Omoplata’ for more:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mRsqvRduHY

Base

  • When you’re on top, your base is your connection with the ground.  It needs to be constantly revised as your opponent pushes and pulls you. If you feel yourself losing your balance, you need to put some part of your body on the ground in the direction you’re falling towards.  Ideally, this would be one of your knees or feet, but it can also be your hand, elbow, or even head.
  • When you’re on the bottom, you need to have awareness of where the opponent has a post / connection with the ground.  When trying to sweep them, take them towards where they do not have a post.   To prevent them from making a post, control any of their limbs that they could use to post out.  e.g. when sweeping to your opponent’s right side, you almost always want to have control over their right arm.

See ‘BJJ Scout: Rodolfo Vieira Takedown Study Part 1 – A Study of Planes’ for more on this.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgkNZeoVSG0

Grips

  • When you want to break somebody’s grip:
    • Grab on their hand as close as you can to the fingers, rather than at the wrist
    • Get your core as close as you can to their fingers; and get their fingers far as you can from their core.  Whoever has their core closest to the grip has the advantage
    • The weak point in a grip is where the thumb and 4 fingers meet.  So you always want to pull the opponent’s hand in the opposite direction.

    • Try and bend or twist their wrist joint, which will weaken their grip.  In the video below ‘Josh Barnett, Double Wrist Lock: Jiu-Jitsu Magazine, Issue #32.’, you can see that Barnett is grabbing the hand instead of the wrist, and giving it a twist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhgOed0v9OI
  • When it comes to maintaining your own grip, grip gently most of the time to conserve energy.  Only grip hard when the opponent is actively trying to break your grip.  If you’re gripping the sleeve and the opponent tries to rip their arm back, keep a relaxed grip and just allow your arm to go forward, rather than gripping super hard and not letting your arm move at all.   Try to keep your wrist straight.

Bottom game

  • When you’re on the bottom of guard, you should look to sweep, submit, or stand up
  • When you’re on the bottom, you usually want to be on your side, vs being flat on your back.  This is because you can push and pull strongest directly in front of you.  When you’re flat on your back, you’re pushing straight up against gravity.   Also, when you’re flat on your back,  if you want to do a hip extension, your head will hit the ground and you have nowhere to go.  If you’re sideways, you can do a hip extension and move your head back, even if your hips can’t go forward.

  • When you’re on the bottom, it’s important to have an accurate understanding of where your opponent’s weight is at any given time, and push him more in that direction.
    • If his weight is to your left, push him more left
    • If his weight is centered, then push him left, and then you know he’ll push back to the right, so you can be ready to push him to the right

Top game

 

  • When you’re on top, trying to put a lot of pressure on your opponent, put your body in extension so you become like a bowling ball.  This minimizes the surface area that you put on your opponent, which focuses your weight into one spot.   Think about how a 10 pound bowling ball would feel much worse on your chest than a 10 pound blanket.  Also think about how if you were to push on a blanket, the blanket would naturally make a pocket for your hand that would allow you to move the blanket.  If you pushed on a bowling ball and it spun a little, your hand would slip right off.

 

 

Miscellaneous

  • Where the head goes, the body follows.
    • You usually want to keep your head free (e.g. by blocking your opponent from cross-facing you or putting their forearm across your neck).
    • If you’re on the bottom of mount, you usually want to bridge the opponent to the side their head is on, because more weight is on that side.
    • When you’re on the bottom of butterfly guard trying to do a hook sweep, you usually want to sweep them to the side their head is on, for the same reason.
  • It’s better to be facing your opponent when they’re not facing you. So you’d always like to move towards their side or back.  In order to get to their side or back, you need to be able to go under or around their arm on that side, e.g. with an underhook or arm drag.

Related:

Advice for BJJ white belts

Tips for learning and getting better faster in BJJ

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/

Advice for BJJ white belts

Advice for BJJ white belts

Here are some tips especially for beginners.

Consistency

When something has become a habit, like brushing your teeth, it doesn’t take much energy or willpower. Establishing good habits early on can pay big dividends. Make a commitment to show up to class on a regular basis. The number one reason that people don’t advance in jiu-jitsu is because they stop showing up.  Nothing will help you get better more than mat hours.  Firas Zahabi talks about the power of habits here:

Slow down when drilling:

Slow down when practicing technique

Focus on escapes

Having good escapes is the best thing you can do to make your guard better. We all know people who get the closed guard on someone, then just squeeze with their legs and arms for dear life and stall the top person out.  This is not the way to get better.

When you are confident in your positional escapes from side control, mount, etc, then you’re not afraid to attack aggressively from the guard, because even if you get your guard passed, you can handle it.

The same thing applies to submission escapes.  For example, when your submission escapes and prevention are good, you’re not afraid to take risks to open the guard and pass the guard when you’re on top.  A strong foundation in escapes is the rock on which everything else sits.

Focus on breathing / relaxing

Beginners typically hold their breath and keep too much tension in their bodies, especially when rolling, but sometimes even when practicing technique with no resistance.  Holding your breath and keeping your muscles unnecessarily tense burns a lot of energy, and once you’re tired, you won’t learn as much.

When practicing and when rolling, focus on breathing deep and slow into your belly, and relaxing every part of your body that doesn’t specifically need to be tense at the moment.  In the beginning, when you do this, you may perform worse in rolling.  Your guard may get passed or you may get tapped out when you could have prevented it by using a lot of energy.  But over time, you’ll become much more energy efficient in the long term.  And even the first time you ever try this, you’ll notice that if you roll for 5 rounds, you’re doing much better in the later rounds.  There is also an additional benefit that you’re less likely to spazz out and hurt your partner.

Positive mentality

As a beginner, usually you are learning and getting better very fast, like drinking from a firehose, so your overall expectations are high.  Of course, some days won’t go so well.  You may even hit a plateau, or a run of bad days.  It’s important to realize that this is normal and expected, and you just have to keep pressing on through it and enjoying the process.

Marcelo Garcia’s advice to white belts:

Related:

Tips for learning and getting better faster in BJJ