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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’

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

Tips for teaching BJJ

So you’ve started teaching Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Congratulations! You’ll find that having to teach will help you get a much deeper understanding of jiu-jitsu, since you have to explain it to someone else.

Below are some tips for beginning teachers.

Time management

Be flexible with your time management.

e.g. you might prepare a certain amount of material that’s enough to fill the time if everyone catches on to the material pretty fast. If during teaching, you notice people are having lots of problems, then you should probably cut some of the material and take enough time to make sure at least everyone has the first part down properly.

The worst thing would be to be stubborn and go through all the material too fast and then they can’t do anything properly.

Balancing the amount of details

Let’s say you wanted to teach the armbar from the guard and you have too many details for anyone to remember in one go. It would be a bad idea to go through all the details and have the students forget most of them and feel overwhelmed. Instead, first teach how to get the right arm positioning and hip movement, and then have them practice that. Only once everybody is good with that, then show putting the leg over the face, preventing the stack, and finishing.

As a general rule, three is a good number of techniques to show and a good number of major details to show for each technique before letting the students try it. There’s something about that number that seems to work well for retention in the human brain. See these links for more:

How to Use the ‘Rule of Three’ to Create Engaging Content

Teaching Tip- Gimme Three Steps

Balancing praise and criticism

You should have a 2:1 or more ratio of compliments to criticisms for each student. If students get too many criticisms, they get discouraged. So even if a student is terrible and is messing up a lot, try to find something that he’s doing right and mention that too. Don’t try to fix everything he’s doing wrong in one session. Just fix the one or two most important things. If you try to fix too much, he may fix problem 1 and 2, but then when he’s trying to fix problem 3, he starts exhibiting problem 1 again.

Viewing angle

Pay attention to the angle of the students when you’re demonstrating the move. Make sure you and your demo partner are positioned such that most people can see the right stuff. Don’t be afraid to tell the students that are on the wrong side to move around to the right side so they can see the important stuff. This is one of the most common problems for beginning teachers.

Class structure

There are many ways to structure a class that are valid. Just make sure you think over how the techniques you show interrelate, and how best to get the students to absorb them. Some ideas are to have the students practice each technique in order, to mix in positional drills with increasing resistance, or to have the partner feed the student a random trigger action so the student can choose the correct response. It also is beneficial to explain the ‘why’ of each movement that you do. If a student understands why you put your hand in a particular place, it helps them remember to do it, and it may also help them understand what to do in other situations. I would recommend always doing some kind of isolation drill that forces the students to try to do the moves that they just learned, but against a resisting partner. When you try to do the move against a resisting opponent, you retain it much better.

Setup / preconditions

Many techniques are predicated upon a certain body positioning by the opponent. A particular move may only work if the opponent has their head up, or down, or is putting their weight more to one side or another. Make sure to explain very clearly and reiterate the preconditions for doing the move. If one training partner isn’t putting their body in the right position, his or her partner will be unable to do the technique properly. Make sure to correct people who aren’t putting their body in the right position. If a technique isn’t working for a person, try doing the move yourself on their partner, and you may realize that the partner isn’t setting them up for success.

Imagery / analogy

In boxing, ‘answering the phone’ is a common term used to describe keeping one’s hand up by the ear to defend the head. In the image below, the fighter on the right is using this technique. Analogies like these greatly help retention of key concepts.

Flexibility

There are many ways to do a technique. For a given technique, Marcelo Garcia, Buchecha, Jacare, and Roger Gracie may all do it different ways, but none of them are wrong. If a student chooses to do a slight variation, with a different grip or arm positioning, I would explain to them why I do it my way, and the pros and cons vs doing it their way, but if they choose to keep doing it their way, I don’t have a problem with that. Forcing them to do it your way is problematic because it kills their sense of creativity and ownership over their own jiu-jitsu.

Leg lasso guard omoplata

The omoplata from lasso guard is a favorite of mine. When you get it right, it feels very effortless. The riskiest moment is when you let go of the sleeve grip to switch to gripping behind the elbow. In that moment, it’s possible for the opponent to weave their arm out. Some keys for keeping it tight in that moment:

Pull forward and down with the collar grip. When their head is down, it’s hard for the opponent to weave their arm out.
Before switching your grip, insert your lasso leg pretty deep forward, so that the opponent’s arm is trapped in the crook of your knee, as opposed to higher up on your leg. Do a leg curl with your lasso leg, to pinch their arm between your hamstring and calf
BAD(lassoed arm near ankle/calf):
Good(lassoed arm stuck in crook of knee):
This clip by Clark Gracie explains the proper positioning:

‘Clark Gracie : Spider Guard, Omoplata & triangle’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hc_9X36-M8

Some other clips:

‘Guerrilla Tech of the Week – Lasso Hook to Omoplata – From Open Guard and Reverse De la Riva’:

‘Fix Your Jiu Jitsu – Ep 14 – Seeing The Omoplata | Rachel Demara, Clark Gracie, Zak Maxwell’:

‘High Percentage Omoplata Setup from Spider Guard’ by lliott Bayev, Ostap Manastyrski and Stephan Kesting:

‘Osvaldo “Queixinho” BJJ – Omoplata from spider guard’:

‘Samir Chantre, Omoplata From Lasso Guard: Jiu-Jitsu Magazine, Issue #30.’:

Marcelo Garcia-style side control escapes in Rory McDonald vs JT Torres

Marcelo Garcia-style side control escapes in Rory McDonald vs JT Torres at Metamoris 5

Metamoris just released the footage for this match free on Youtube, which you can view here:

I was impressed by both athletes, but I really noticed Rory McDonald’s repeated use of the sit up escape and elbow push escape, which are favorites of mine. See this post for more from me on these escapes:
http://bjjpressure.com/breakdown-of-marcelo-garcias-side-control-escape-principles/

This is definitely the most times I’ve seen them used in a competition match at such a high level. Of course it helped that the match was 20 minutes long and JT Torres is such a good guard passer.

At 3:32, Rory used an elbow push to hip roll in response to a stack pass.

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The commentators referred to it as the ‘Turkish get-up escape’ , which is an apt name.

At 4:24, a sit up escape.

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As a bonus, around 11:55, Rory does an interesting mount escape where he put his hands on JT’s hips and popped his legs up in the air repeatedly until he got his guard back. We’ve seen this before from Garry Tonon.

At 13:40, elbow push to counter a stack pass, in the top right of the video.

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At 17:49, sit up escape to hip roll escape.

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These are a great example of how effective these escapes are, to be used against a great top player like Torres.

Self defense and BJJ

Here are some thoughts on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and self defense.

Why is BJJ useful for self defense? Is BJJ better than such-and-such martial art?

Check out this clip of Matt Thornton on Aliveness in martial arts:

Essentially, any martial art in which you train with aliveness (real resistance and sparring), will develop great attributes for fighting or self-defense. Any martial art which does not involve a lot of live training is a waste of time, even if they focus more on self-defense. Are there differences in the effectiveness of different martial arts when trained with aliveness? Yes, probably, but I don’t think the difference is so much that it should be a big deal. Instead of spending so much time arguing on the Internet, everyone would be better of spending that time training.

If we agree that aliveness is the key ingredient, then grappling is a great choice because sparring regularly in grappling is low impact and more approachable for most people than sparring in say, boxing or Muay Thai.

Is sport BJJ moving too far away from old-school self-defense based BJJ?

I think the main benefit of training is to build attributes, rather than technique. When you train, you build balance, sensitivity, timing, strength, cardio, fear control, breath control, and things of that nature. So I wouldn’t worry overly much if you’re practicing berimbolos or things like that which are less applicable for a fight. The technique isn’t as important as the attributes, and you’re still getting a lot of benefit out of it.

In BJJ circles, the common Gracie basics self-defense curriculum is designed to defend against common attacks from an unskilled opponent, like a wide haymaker swing, or a standing side headlock, that no one with skills would ever do. And this is typically practiced with little or no live resistance. I don’t necessarily consider this to be effective self-defense training.

Of course, if your main goal is self-defense, then you should train with strikes sometimes, and also with weapons and multiple opponents. But the training should be alive, with real and unpredictable resistance. Ideally it would also incorporate scenario training, with decision making and verbal de-escalation. A great source for training like this is Craig Douglas, aka SouthNarc of Shivworks.

What about awareness and verbal agility for self-defense?

This kind of stuff is really under-rated in some circles. Avoiding the fight, or at least avoiding getting sucker-punched, is arguably of much more importance than being good in a fight.

For more on this, check out SouthNarc on ‘managing unknown contacts’:
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2012/09/self-defense-southnarc-aka-craig_718.html
If this link goes down, Google it. It’s worth the effort.

Also check out these videos on pre-assault cues: