Month: January 2017

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