This past Saturday we covered Lesson 26 of the Crossroads Martial arts Curriculum covers one of the most important positions in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu self defense curriculum, the headlock. The headlock is one of the most common occurring situations in a street fight and for this reason it is spread throughout the Crossroads Martial Arts Curriculum. In Lesson 26 we cover how to escape the position from the feet after your posture has been broken. If we can blend our movement with that of our attacker we can turn their movement in to our momentum, then use that momentum as the energy for our throw. This means that we can successfully throw people much larger than ourselves because we are not relying on our own strength to to power the technique.
On the ground we discuss a back take off of an elbow escape attempt. This is a great way to advance our position and make it even harder for the person on the bottom to escape, and give ourselves more time to work the submission. The back take is performed by watching the angle of the person on the bottoms shoulder, once it crosses a particular line we can use our chest to force the person on the bottom to roll over to their stomach. Once the person has rolled over onto their stomach we discuss how to improve our position further by using our “hooks” or or legs to control the lower half of the bottom players body. Once we have securely secured the position and significantly reduced the opportunities for escape we begin to work for the choke hold.
The techniques we cover in this lesson discuss the main strategy of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Take the fight to the ground, take the back, and apply a choke hold, or restrain the person until help arrives. The ability to control a fully resisting opponent in class is something that translates to the real world very easily, everybody reacts similar then they put in a situation where they are being constrained, there are only so many ways a person can try to get up, by preparing and drilling these situations in the gym we know exactly what the person on the bottom will do and exactly what to do to stop it.