Today’s lesson started with learning what to do when somebody grabs you around the waist. There are a few different ways that this will happen, a person will either be in front of you or behind you, and they will either grab over your arms, or underneath them. By drilling all four different scenarios we will be prepared and know what to do whenever somebody grabs us around our chest or waist. In Lesson 5 we cover when somebody is in front of us and they have grabbed us over our arms.
In every self defense technique the first thing you need to do is to make sure you don’t fall down. While Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is known as a ground fighting art you always want to make sure that you bring the fight to the ground on your terms and in a controlled manner. By a controlled manner I mean, when you are in control of your opponents body and not the other way around. By maintaining your base and keeping your balance you can move to a safer position and cause your attacker to lose there balance and end up on the ground in the bottom position.
We start this lessons ground techniques learning how to break somebodies closed guard. The closed guard is a very powerful position with a multitude of sweeps and submissions. If you are not careful you can easily be submitted or get reversed to the bottom position. Once we have broken the guard only then can you improve your position and move yourself into a position where you can control and submit your opponent.
In this class we covered two ways pass the guard, the leg over pass and the stack pass. The great thing about these two passes is that they can be easily linked together in order to confuse your opponent and then choose the easiest way to improve your position. Because your opponents leg can only be either up or down, and one pass is designed to go over your opponents leg while the other is designed to go under it, these two passes are two very simple techniques that perfectly demonstrate one of jiu-jitsu’s fundamental concepts, chaining or linking techniques so that you can best strength with intelligence.