Lesson One starts with a basic standing headlock escape. The headlock is one of the most commonly used tactics somebody who is untrained will use in a street fight so understanding how to escape is essential to being able to defend yourself. There are two basic variations of a headlock, the first when the attacker is trying to punch you, and the second when your attacker is simply holding your head. When your attacker is simply holding your head this usually means they are trying to throw you onto the ground.
In lesson one you learned, or will learn(depending on when your reading this) how to defend yourself against somebody who is trying to use the headlock to throw or drag you to the ground. Starting with how to keep your posture and use “Body Positioning” to keep your balance, then how to manipulate your training partners balance to thrown them and land on top where we can use our Brazilian Jiu-jitsu effectively.
On the ground we will cover how to our body weight to hold somebody down and control them in the side control position to set up the opportunity to improve our position and move to the mount position. One of the most common sayings in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is position before submission. Brazilian Or Gracie Jiu-Jitsu’s founders Carlos and Helio Gracie created a hierarchy of positions that you want or don’t want to be in a fight. The positions you want to be in allow you to control, punch or submit your attacker without them having the ability to control, punch or submit you. By moving from Side Control to Mount you move from a position where you have the ability to submit your attacker to a position where you can both submit and punch your attacker while they can do neither.
Lesson one finishes with the most basic submission you can learn, the Cross Collar Choke. By applying pressure to the Carotid Arteries on the neck you can reduce the blood supply traveling to the Brain causing somebody to pass out or “go to sleep”. By placing your hands into a persons Jacket and “squeezing” you can cause them to go to sleep, protecting yourself and causing them no permanent injury.
The sequence of techniques covered in lesson one are an ideal Brazilian Jiu-jitsu fight senerio. If attacked by surprise and put into a headlock we keep our balance, bring the fight to the ground, land in a dominate position, control our attacker until they fatigue, improve our position and put the attacker to sleep allowing us to escape unharmed.