Grappling Tips Newsletter

September 25, 2005

Shutting Down the Leglock Game

There is a certain type of opponent who is best described as a compulsive leglocker. You know the type: no sooner have you put him in your guard than he flings himself backwards and starts attacking your lower body with ankle locks, toe holds, kneebars and other submissions. You generally don't want to trade leglocks with this kind of opponent - he uses them all the time and will probably get to the submission first - so what can you do?

There are certain strategies that are very helpful in shutting down the game of a leglock-oriented opponent:

Maintaining a closed guard if you are on the bottom. There are very few effective leglocks that can be used against a closed guard.
Breaking your opponent's posture if they are in your guard: it is very difficult to go for a leglock if you can't posture up first.
Maintaining your grips: if you are wrestling with the gi then sleeve and/or collar grips make it difficult for your opponent to entwine your legs with his arms and throw himself backwards.
Passing the guard on your knees. There are quite a few leglock attacks that can be applied by an opponent who is on his back when you are standing in his guard. If you stay on your knees when passing his guard you will make yourself less vulnerable to most leglocks (at the expense of being more vulnerable to chokes and armlocks).

Finally I should point out that you should still practise your leglock counters. For every submission there are multiple counters and escapes, and you might want to review and practice them just in case your opponent figures out a way to counter your other strategies. A working knowledge of leglocks themselves is very useful to understand how to counter them, and it IS possible to be good at leglock counters without being good at leglocks themselves.

Labels: leglocks

permanent link to this article posted by Stephan @ 12:14 PM

September 17, 2005

Defeating the Smaller Opponent

I am sure some of you are scratching your heads, trying to figure out why on earth I would be writing about how to beat a smaller opponent. Well smaller opponents tend to be fast, squirrelly, and sneaky – and they’re not about to take it easy on you just because you’re bigger – so I think it’s a valid topic to address.

In last week’s tip I talked about Godzilla and Japanese army jeeps; in this week’s scenario YOU are Godzilla and your opponent is the jeep. This leads to your obvious strategy: crush that smaller, faster, squirrelly, sneaky opponent! Make him bear your weight and you start to take away his mobility and tire him out. He’s not going to move slower because you happen to be bigger, so don’t you pretend to be lighter just because he’s smaller.

Making your opponent carry your weight is a fine art, which relies on several components. Weight placement is one factor: putting your weight over his chest and diaphragm area helps cut down on his ability to breathe. Anchoring your weight, typically by pulling on his gi, hooking his neck, etc., makes you even heavier. Sensitivity to your opponent’s movement and breathing patterns is another part of not allowing your opponent to recover lost ground.

Here is my one sentence summation of grappling with size differences: if you are larger than your opponent, crush him, but if you are smaller than your opponent, move around or he will crush you.

permanent link to this article posted by Stephan @ 1:01 PM

September 11, 2005

The Larger, Stronger Opponent

If you try contesting a larger, stronger opponent using your strength against his strength you will probably lose. You need to fight the battle on your own terms, and two effective (and somewhat related) strategies to do this include:

move quicker
tire him out.

These strategies may sound obvious, but it is amazing how many grapplers forget this and use power against power.

Moving quicker: if a larger, stronger grappler gets the chance he will play Godzilla and pretend that you are a small Japanese army jeep.

One way not to play his game is to move the heck out of the way! You have less body mass to accelerate than he does, so in most cases you will be faster and more nimble than him. Start moving and don’t stop until you end up in a good position, like in full rearmount.

You may get lucky and catch him in something right off the bat, but even if you don’t you will still frustrate him and tire him out, which leads us right to…

Tire him out: if you think that your endurance is better than his it is time to start a battle of attrition. Force him to move around and respond to your movements and technique.

You’re not necessarily trying to catch him with all these techniques you're trying; you just want to force the action and keep him moving and moving and moving.

Don’t let him rest – many big guys like to fight in small explosive bursts, taking rests in between these sprints (think of how a bodybuilder trains in the gym). Deprive them of this rest and they will usually slip deeper and deeper into the lactic acid zone, which is where you will finally be able to finish the fight on your terms.

This second strategy can be summed up as “survive first, win later”.

Labels: positions, the guard

permanent link to this article posted by Stephan @ 2:54 PM

September 04, 2005

DVD Announcement

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permanent link to this article posted by Stephan @ 2:47 PM

September 03, 2005

How to Beat Any Opponent (Honest)!

The question I get asked most often goes something like this: “There is a guy at my club (let’s call him ‘Bill’) who bench presses 400 pounds, used to wrestle in college, and has an 18 inch neck. Bill has been doing jiu-jitsu for only a couple of years, but he has already learned how to counter all my attacks. I have been doing jiu-jitsu for twice as long as Bill, and I find it very frustrating when he crushes me. I want to kill Bill, at least on the grappling mat: what do I do?”

I am not going to answer this question right now; instead I am going tackle an even bigger question. This bigger question is “how do I beat anybody". The way that you beat any opponent is always the same: YOU TRY TO MATCH YOUR OPPONENT WHERE YOUR PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES OR TECHNICAL ASPECTS ARE SUPERIOR AND HIS ARE INFERIOR. Another way of saying this is that you want to fight to your strength(s) and against your opponent’s weakness(es).

Let’s first look at physical attributes. It is unlikely that your opponent will be stronger, AND heavier, AND more flexible, AND faster, AND have better endurance, AND have better balance, AND have more fighting spirit, AND have more pain tolerance than you.

At least 95% of the time you will be able to identify at least one physical attribute in which you are superior to your opponent. Let’s say that he can bench press 400 pounds but you are more flexible than him: you need to find a way to make your superior attribute (flexibility) become the deciding factor, and not match him where he is superior (physical strength).

On a technical level there are many different types of grappling styles and games. To beat an opponent it really helps to figure out which style of game he is good at and what style of game you are good at. If he is really skilled at using the open guard, for example, then you want to make sure that you play a different game than trying to pass his open guard. Some examples of other grappling styles and games might include:

A tight position game
A flowing speed game
A floating game
An explosive, bridging-based game
A half guard game (or butterfly guard, or closed guard, or spider guard, etc.)
A footlock-based game
A game based on collar chokes and armbars
An endurance-based attrition game
A gi-entanglement game
etc.

In the next couple of weeks I will try to address some of the more common scenarios and give you some concrete examples of how to modify your game to deal with a supposedly ‘superior’ opponent. This whole topic is really summed up best by Genrikh Chepukaitis a chess master, who said: "You need not play well - just help your opponent to play badly."

permanent link to this article posted by Stephan @ 2:51 PM