Category Archives: Technique

Avoiding Knee Injury Against Jumping Closed Guard

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I firmly believe that the road to improvement in any sport should involve the mastery of injury prevention. I am constantly trying to understand what positions may lead to injury and look to avoid those positions or it least avoid the aspects of those positions that result in injury. Let me be more specific with an example from a recent tournament…

A common dangerous situation is when I’m looking to take my opponent down and they are looking to jump closed guard. In most cases, neither person has extensive experience with this exact situation. Most grapplers do not drill (nearly enough) jumping closed guard, and I certainly don’t drill shooting a double while a person is jumping closed guard. Those drilling sessions are too painful to imagine. What has happened to me in the past a few times is I made the mistake of not keeping my knees bent (even just slightly). There are a million reasons not to keep you legs locked out, but when you get tired you do stupid things. So when my opponent jumps closed guard, it’s tempting to step the straight leading leg forward. If they jump too low, this will result in their bodyweight slamming up against my knee. Here’s an example:

When your opponent jumps closed guard, they often pull you forward. This naturally forces you to step forward with as the person does in this video. Injury result when this step is taken on a straight leg not a bent one. The way to avoid injury is to keep a strong base and a bent leading leg. That way the leading leg can support the weight of the jumping person’s body. In general it’s good to have at least a slightly bent leg at all time, kind of like Olympic-style wrestlers do. With a slightly bent leg you can change levels quicker, sprawl back quicker, move around quicker, etc.

Tai Otoshi Judo Throw in BJJ Competition (2013 Pans)

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To me one the main benefits of judo for a jiu jitsu competitor is as simple as providing confidence in basic movement on the feet, basic gripping, basic posture, etc. That’s how it helped me, but it’s especially cool to see the occasional judoka pull off a textbook throw at the higher level of competition. I’ve seen a few drop morote seoi nage’s and a lot of excellent foot sweeps, but I haven’t yet seen a tai otoshi pulled off quite as nice as it was done in the following clip of a brown belt match from the 2013 Pans:

Here’s Jimmy Pedro breaking down this exact technique. He describes a useful grip variation for a BJJ competitor, but the guy in the above clip didn’t need the variation. He did it the old school judo way.

A Single Leg is Hard to Finish

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I tweaked my hip yesterday and was limping all day like an old wise judoka. Add to that a lack of sleep due to a bunch of deadlines and stress at work, and I was a damn mess (and missed the usually very good competition training session at Marco’s). When I’m mentally drained in that way, I’ll drill at home and watch some instructional videos on the same several positions I’ve been working on over the last year. Here’s one: the single leg.

Look at 5:50 in the following video. It’s two minutes of AJ Agazarm trying to finish a single leg on Victor Silveiro in a brown belt match-up at the 2013 Pans.

I see this kind of battle a lot, especially at the lighter weights, and especially in no-gi, but it really spans all weight divisions and styles. As is often said in wrestling, the way to win this battle is early aggression. It’s best to attack in combinations before the opponent gets a chance to establish good balance on the one foot. For this reason, I don’t like the single leg in training. If the training partner doesn’t want to go down, there often isn’t a nice and controlled way to put them down. I like to work technique that don’t hurt people, because I want to get a lot of reps in, and it’s easier to get reps in when the other person isn’t being destroyed in the process.

A lot of jiu jitsu guys (Marcelo Garcia is a great example) like the “running the pipe” finish. I think it’s effective, but it never clicked with me the way the “sweep the leg” finish has. Kolat shows a good version of it:

Here’s a nice set of 9 videos on finishing single leg takedowns:

The way to finish a single leg is simple: (1) keep them moving, (2) combine attacks, (3) aggression. All that is a lot of work. I like to think of the single leg finish as almost a position in itself, and like any position my goal is to make sure that I’m expanding less energy than my opponent. I think I’ve often fallen victim to that adrenaline rush that goes with the feeling that I’m very close to taking the guy down. There is no “almost” in grappling or life. You have to do the smart thing up until the very end. Don’t throw technique and sense out the window just because you’re “almost” there.

The Paradox of the Choke and the Armbar

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judo-arm-barIt may be just me, and the people I train with, but I noticed that the majority of people who submit me do so via choke, but people that are MUCH better than me submit via armlock (armbar, kimura, americana, etc) from side control. That’s not an absolute rule, but I have been noticing this little pattern throughout my jiu jitsu development. So here it goes, this might be complete bullshit, but bare with me.

The Theory Behind the Choke Armbar Chasm

My theory is that when a person is MUCH better than me I start to drown in the overwhelming feeling of always being a split second behind, always off balance, always outgripped. It seems that one of the effects of that feeling is I try to catch up, regain balance, and break grips. I start to panic physically, moving against the basic principles of jiu jitsu (that on the contrary I do manage to follow when I’m in control). One of the first principles that falls apart for me is elbow discipline. My arms start floating about like spaghetti in the wind, and are thus susceptible to all kinds of armlocks.

So the people I’m talking about never get to take my back because they already broke my arm (not literally) before ever having the chance to take my back.

Or It’s All Just Subjective Nonsensical Rambling

Of course, I could just be basing my theory on recent training sessions with Steve, Rick, Josh, and Drew alone, all of who break my arm 3-15 times in a single round. The names may or may not have been altered to maintain the anonymity of those individuals ;-)

In reality, the above theory is mostly specific to the way my fundamentals fall apart when in survival mode. That’s one of the many things I have to work on.

Technique Beats Strength, Conditioning, Experience, and Heart

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A Culture of Heroic Grit

There is a romantic belief in sports in America (and everywhere really) that the “fighting spirit” or the will to win can overcome any obstacle. Heart and grit are the stuff that great sports movies are made of. And indeed, to me, that’s why I love sports, and that’s why I participate in sports. It’s a chance to test your ability to overcome the mental blocks of fear and exhaustion. Athletes like Frank Molinaro are the perfect representatives of grit like that, willing to take their body and mind to places most people, even top athletes, are not willing to go:

Technique is King

Still, I believe that technique is king, and will overcome that kind of grit in the long term. I think the more productive “heart” and “spirit” come out in the relentless dedication you show to the development of technique over a period of years. It’s the willingness to put in thousands of reps in drilling each small part of a technique, the transition from one part to another, under various resistance levels, alone or with a partner. You have to engage your mind by learning from your coaches, from instructionals, from books, from YouTube. The result is a constant evolution of your drilling and your training.

The Goal is Effortless Domination

The goal is not to work harder than everyone else. The goal is discover the timing and mechanics at the core of the sport by relaxing and keeping your mind open to change and learning. I personally don’t like the term “flow rolling” that’s often used to describe the kind of training where you move from position to position without using much force in resisting the positional progression of your training partner. I think it’s extremely valuable to roll at 100% while moving exactly as you do when you “flow roll”. That might sound contradictory, but to me it’s not. My goal is to effortlessly trick my training partner into being defenseless for a split second. I fail often of course, but the point is that I’m constantly moving and learning the precise timing of when I can fake a movement that will create an opening for an easy guard pass, back take, sweep, submission, etc.

I want to learn to be always a split second ahead of my opponent without having too use strength, quickness, or flexibility.

The Sage of Drilling

johnsmithIn wrestling, I think many people idolize Dan Gable for the relentless nature of his spirit. His mental breaking point is far above almost any other athlete in history. Like everyone else, I look up to him, but I can’t see his obsession as prescriptive for others to follow, perhaps because nobody else has that kind of superhuman mental fortitude. For me, the person I study and try to imitate in training and in life much more than Gable is another wrestling legend: John Smith. He is a 4-time World champion and a 2-time Olympic champion. He is a big proponent of drilling for two reasons: (1) fastest way to improve and (2) longevity. Here is a long quote from him that I like to re-read often:

“Drilling is the key to wrestling success and to longevity in the sport. Drilling has to become habit forming. Drilling wasn’t natural for more, I’d rather just go in a room and spar hard. I just wanted to shake hands and go! But drilling has to take place for you to get better. I couldn’t do a better leg lace or gut wrench without breaking down the move, seeing how it works, studying it and drilling it, over and over and over.

That’s when you improve your techniques. Someone who doesn’t spend time doing that and drilling isn’t going to improve. For longevity, drilling is very important, if you want to stay in the sport for many years, then you have to stay healthy. Constant sparring and live goes can beat your body up pretty bad. After the world championships, I would drill for three months, with very little sparring. That’s when I got better, and I also stayed injury free.”

Jiu Jitsu Fundamentals: An Argument for Berimbolo and X Guard

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Aesopian wrote an interesting blog post about where Berimbolo fits in with the “basics”, and it reminded me of something that I’ve been thinking about and evolving on for quite some time.

I have long heard instructors and top-level competitors teach the value of focusing on the “fundamentals” of jiu jitsu. When I first started training, I took that to mean doing a set of basic techniques of the kind Saulo Ribeiro teaches in his awesome book Jiu-Jitsu University. But it wasn’t the techniques that made that kind of jiu jitsu “fundamental”. It was having a complete cohesive set of underlying principles…

Some Basic Principles of Jiu Jitsu

  • Posture: Similar to judo, wrestling, and even olympic weightlifting, jiu jitsu has its own posture rules that have to do both with resisting off-balancing and applying maximum pressure with your hips through leverage. Posture includes the lower back, shoulders, neck, and hips, but every part of your body contributes (including toes, hands, eyes, quads, etc.)
  • Base and balance: Maintain balance throughout the entirety of a movement when you’re on top and work to off-balance your opponent when you’re on bottom.
  • Grip control: Use grips (gi or no-gi) on wrists, elbows, ankles, lapels, pants, belt, neck, etc. to control the opponent.
  • Use their force against them: Move around the force applied by your opponent not against it. When he pushes, don’t simply push back, push and pull and use the moment of defenselessness to transition into a more dominant position or to submit.
  • Protect your limbs. Elbows in. Heels in. No floating wrists and feet.

The above is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more and the list is always growing. The above has a lot of exceptions, but the point is you can win 99% of your matches without knowing those exceptions. That’s what makes these principles fundamental.

Evolution of Principles

Just as new techniques rise into popular use in competition, new principles are also uncovered and clarified in our collective jiu jitsu mind. The community learns and shares new ways of generating leverage, of applying pressure, or utilizing grips for control.

In fact, I believe that ANY system of techniques based on consistent application of the above principles (and more) is what I would refer to as fundamental jiu jitsu. So in that sense, the x-guard is a fundamental technique because with the help of people like Marcelo Garcia, Fredson Alves, and a thousand other black belts, the x-guard system has evolved a set of rules to a point where you can have a complete game within just the butterfly guard and x guard positions. You very rarely have to venture outside that if you don’t want to. You can win with it at white, blue, purple, brown, and black.

The Future of Berimbolo

berimboloI believe the same is or eventually will be the case for the Berimbolo. This de la riva guard sweep system has evolved in the last few years from a set of technique to a complete system of principles. I believe you can limit your game to just the de la riva, reverse de la riva, and inverted guard and not have to venture outside of that 99% of the time. That’s fundamental jiu jitsu.

I think people freely (and I believe incorrectly) interchange the concept of “old school jiu jitsu” with “fundamental jiu jitsu”. I’m guilty of this as well. Probably because my favorite game to play and to watch is the takedown, smash pass, mount, x-choke game a la Xande or Roger. It’s tempting to assume that this game is somehow the closest to the underlying principles of what makes jiu jitsu work. But that’s, of course, not the case. The principles are simple physics. But like all laws of physics, it only seem simple once you discover it, and there is always more to be discovered…

Be Careful: Five Ways to Hurt Others in Jiu Jitsu Training

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To me, one of the biggest parts of jiu jitsu is staying healthy and avoiding injury. In some cases, being overly cautious in trying to avoid injury can actually have the opposite effect of putting you at greater risk of it. Jiu jitsu at times, like much of life, can be a cruel counter-intuitive mistress. The way I approach it: I try to relax, quiet my ego, and focus on not hurting my training partners, and hope that they return the favor.

There are some things I noticed that I do (and others do to me) that can lead to injury (large or small). So let’s all agree to be careful with those things and use common sense. Here are five of them:

  • Jump closed guard really suddenly from semi-standing exchanges such as when your partner comes up for a single. His lower back or legs might be a little relaxed and thus vulnerable to be hurt due to suddenly having to carry all your body weight. When training from the feet, most people (especially non-competitors) don’t expect you to jump guard or jump anything really. They expect you to either go for a takedown or to pull guard by sitting with a foot in the hip or some other variation of that.
  • Wristlocks: I know that footlocks get a bad rep in jiu jitsu for being potentially dangerous, but I find that people are actually TOO cautious with footlocks in gyms where their danger has been drilled into people’s heads since day 1. On the other hand, wristlocks are not taught very often (even though they are legal in most divisions of most tournaments in both gi and no-gi). And when they are taught, they are not talked about as something that could potentially lead to injury. I don’t know anyone who broke their wrist due to a wristlock, but I do know MANY people that had to be out for 1-2 weeks due to a wristlock and after that still had to take it easy with the wrist for a couple months. It’s a great submission, but be careful when you apply it in training.
  • Guillotines: This had to make the list, of course. The problem with the guillotine is that it has an evil brother: the neck crank. The other problem with the guillotine is that often times if you don’t finish it, you are putting yourself in a less-than-dominant position. So you really want to finish it! But sometimes the technique is a little off and you want to add a little “sauce” by pulling up. And guess what: that cranks the neck. This isn’t a problem really, except that a little tweak of the neck can often leads to pain for weeks. There’s no reason for this. On this one technique I’ll often tap a little early in training, even though I don’t like doing it. And when I’m applying the guillotine, I try hard NOT to crank the neck. If that means I don’t get the submission, I’m okay with that.
  • Pulling the Turtle Backwards: A tight turtle can be a frustrating position to break open, and one of the ways that seems to intuitively make sense to people is to pull the person directly backwards over his ankles. This can actually be an effective technique (with some important details) but it’s also an asshole technique that you should save for competition-style training when anything effective goes. Like most dangerous techniques, they are less likely to cause injury when your training partner is going close to 100% and thus are more physically and mentally primed for a wider range of possibilities.
  • Try Stuff You Don’t Know with the Spazzy Intensity of a Raging Bull: I would say that 90% of my training is about figuring out small details around techniques that I’m already very familiar with. That requires a little exploration: figuring out the timing, feel, and leverage of the technique. But sometimes, I explore beyond the confines of what I know, and their I proceed with caution. I know that I can hurt myself and others. I have the luxury to proceed with caution, because there are always things I can fall back on. Of course, folks that are just starting out don’t have that luxury, since most every technique and position is new. The right approach, therefore, when you start to jiu jitsu is to relax, learn, and explore with caution. The best way to halt your progress in jiu jitsu is to be forced off the mat for months due to a stupid injury.

One of the lessons I’ve learned about training is you have to be very good at reading your training partners. You have to consider their rank, their style, their current mental state, and whether they are preparing for a tournament. It’s a complicated social interaction that takes a long time to learn. This is why beginner white belts are usually the most dangerous: they are not very good at reading these subtle social cues.

Some Techniques Make You Suck Before They Make You Better

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I am always on the look out for new effective techniques, guards, positions, details that fit my game and my body type. I am very selective, but try to remain open to new possibilities. There are no rules of course. Just because not many people play the turtle “guard” in high level competition doesn’t mean it’s off limits.

But I do try to follow a simple guideline. If I see a lot of top-level black belts (with a “style” that’s close to my own) using a certain technique, it’s worth investing in. Sometimes if I see just one black belt using it, it’s enough for me to believe it’s possible to make it work. I then turn off the skeptical part of my brain, and embrace the hope that one day I’ll be able to make it work.

Here’s the problem though… As the title mentions, some of the best techniques are ones that force you take a step back before taking two steps forward. Meaning: the learning process for these techniques will often involve losing position in training and just being generally demoralized by constant failure of the technique.

Alright, so here’s some examples from my own experience in jiu jitsu. First “technique” like  that for me was the butterfly guard. Forcing myself to play butterfly and look for the basic hook sweeps meant that I had very few ways of stopping my training partners from passing me. It was incredibly frustrating and the urge to play on top or play closed guard on bottom was really strong. But eventually I started to get the details that make the position work, and my game improved noticeably.

The same happened when I recentle started to drill the smash pass. I was avoiding it because the idea of defeating guard with the pressure of just my hips was very challenging to pull off against good opponents. But I watched far too many black belts pull it off in competition not to take it serious and begin the long journey of trying it over and over in training. Of course, with this one, I didn’t have to pay too much for failing because you usually don’t lose position from a failed smash pass, but still the process is very frustrating, and it’s always tempting to go back to what I’m comfortable with.

My project for the next several months (at least as I see it now) is to embrace the 1 legged x-guard ala Marcelo Garcia. I’m a big fan of the regular x-guard and always prefer that, but it’s often easier to get the 1 legged x guard instead. There are a million of options from there, and watching video after video of Marcelo preaching the power of this position has finally gotten me convinced.

This one will hurt though… because whenever I try it, I often get passed or fail to sweep or just get put in an uncomfortable / weak position. But those are the best techniques: the ones that make perfect sense for your game, and check your ego by making you feel like a first-day white belt.

This new journey, I’m sure, will be painful, stressful, and full of dead-ends, but I hope that it will make me a more complete and dangerous competitor.

Drilling Micro Transitions to Submissions

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I’ve written a bunch about drilling lately, especially inspired by Jordon Shultz and his recent ebook dedicated exclusively to the subject of drilling. Lloyd Irvin released a nice video on the “micro transitional drilling” yesterday and I can’t pass up the chance to comment on it, even though a few great blog posts have already been written on it:

Analogy: Calories In, Calories Out

For diet that maintains weight, the simple formula is “calories in = calories out”. There’s more to a good diet than that, but the math can’t be tricked. In the same way, for developing good competition jiu jitsu, the simple equation is: you have drill the transition to submission more than your opponent drills the defense to that transition. There’s more to it than that, but once again, you can’t trick the math.

Micro-Transition

In the video, Lloyd Irvin emphasizes the importance of working on the small but critical transition that leads directly or indirectly into a submission. This is different than the way I’ve been drilling. When I work on transitions, I’ll often chain several together. That’s very important to do but it definitely doesn’t sharpen my instinct as much as the micro-transition drilling. I tried it today for several microtransitions into submissions: ezekiel choke, americana, and the teacup armbar.

More Reps, Less Brain

I really liked the result. I didn’t count exactly, but I was able to get over 100 reps in each 5 minute round of drilling without pushing the pace at all. What I also like was that I started to really focus and internalize the flow of the technique. Obviously 100 reps is nothing, but I could sense that 10,000 reps of each technique would make the transitions into these submissions very difficult to stop.

Hard Work is Hard

The above video from Lloyd Irvin doesn’t particularly tell you anything you didn’t already know. He simply reiterates the truth of what breeds success: deliberate practice. Just as he says in the video, whatever good prescriptive advice he provides, most people will take it in, agree with it, enjoy it, plan on doing it, and never actually do it (more than a few times). The challenge is to do it regularly for months and years. It has to be part of your jiu jitsu training.

Breathing for Warriors

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I went to a seminar on breathing (aka the breathing class) today. It was hosted by Osagame and run by Dr. Belisa Vranich (pictured left).

To me, some of the most interesting ideas that she touched on related to the “warriors” part of “breathing for warriors”. She often works with combat athletes on the physiological and psychological aspects of dealing with immense stress in competition through controlling breathing.

Since the audience of this class today ranged from zero martial arts experience to those that practiced jiu jitsu for 10+ years, I think Dr. Vranich adjusted to a slightly more general discussion and practice of breathing. So more than the many cool ideas she explained, the most important thing I took away is how important breathing is, and that breathing exercises have to become a daily part of my training.

Some Ideas on Breathing

She went over the basic anatomy of how we breath. From that, stemmed the discussion of using our diaphragm to get the most oxygen from every inhale: to breath with the whole body.

There are too many things to talk about here. The ideas are simple, but what makes them powerful is that most of us never think about it. We take breathing for granted. If in a tournament, I am driven to exhaustion and panic, I’ll blame poor cardio. While that’s partially true, getting control of breathing (this requires physical and mental practice) could’ve really helped make “bad cardio” less of a factor.

I will definitely write more about this subject in the future as I start practicing the various exercises she pointed me to. There is, of course, a close tie between meditation, breathing, and yoga. They help gain a better understanding of my mind and body. But at the end of the day, grappling is about kicking ass. The breathing just helps maintain focus and clean technique.

Combat Breathing

One of the cool things Dr. Vranich mentioned is “combat breathing” or “tactical breathing”. It’s a simple 4 count technique to gain control of your breathing after it speeds up due to intense activity or a stressful event.

So, in the world of grappling, it could be something you do between matches, or even in between aggressive exchanges. When I’m passing someone’s guard, I imagine that my heart rate must at times jam up against 200 rpm. And once I pass, I often get 3-10 seconds to regain my breathing and composure before going in aggressively for a submission. I don’t mean that I stall, but I think that a lot of the techniques I do from side control often require less energy than the chaotic process of passing guard.

Holding Your Breath for Time

At the start of the class, and again at the end, Dr. Vranich had us hold our breath for time. I’m sure there are many reasons for doing so, but for me it was fun because I’m competitive as hell. Surprisingly, I held my breath less than almost everyone else in the class, but I did improve a good amount after the long mediation session.

Matt (pictured left) beat almost everyone (probably to show off). I believe he was using performance enhancing drugs, but I can’t prove it yet ;-)

In a way, not breathing made me more aware of how much my body needs oxygen, and how powerful this autonomic process is. It seems that gaining some control of it may pay off big in the competition.

PS: Thanks to Alma Qualli and everyone for putting this thing together.