This past Saturday the Jiu-jitsu students at Crossroads BJJ covered another lesson from the Crossroads Martial Arts Curriculium, taking the time to learn new techniques and refine bjj techniques they have seen before. Just like an actual self defense situation, every class in the Crossroads Martial Arts Curriculium starts on the feet, this past Saturday we started working an escape from a standing version of the arm in Guilotine. If you watched UFC 210 you may have seen a very similar position in the MMA bout between Chris Weidman and and Gerard Mousasi, a very dangerous place to be where the attached has the ability to control your posture, land kicks and knees and apply a variety of choke holds. Understanding which direction to move so that we can reduce the attackers ability to squeeze around our neck is essential to escaping the position. Once we were able to escape the squeeze, we drilled a simple take down, remember our goal in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is to bring the fight to the ground on our terms, in control and safely, with a priorety in landing in the top position.
Once on the ground we discussed and drilled the survival position from the bottom of mount and how to elbow escape. The bottom of mount is one of the most difficult positions to eacape and requires each one of your limbs to be positioned correctly in order to prevent the top player from being able to control you and stop your escape attempt in its tracks. When you have all of your limbs in the correct spot(including your head) we refer to this as “the survival position”. This position reduces the number of ways the top player can control you and also takes away any oppergunifiea they have to apply a submission. If you try to escape before you are in the survival position you will either be controlled and unable to escape or worst case you will be submitted in an arm lock or a choke. Once everybody understood what the survival position was we worked how to get there.
From the survival position we worked the most common escape from the position, the elbow escape. The movement for the elbow escape is something that is drilled at the beginning of almost every Brazilian Jiu-jitsu classes at Crossroads and is a movement that must be mastered if you want to achieve success in this particular martial art. From the mount position we discussed two variations to the escape based on where the top player puts thier weight. Once everybody knew how to perform all the details of the escape we worked the movement with controlled resistance in order to begin learning how to execute this move under pressure.
What makes Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu so effective is the way it is trained. Inorder to move through the ranks in BJJ you must be able to perform techniques on people who are trying to perform thier techniques on you. In a real fight the person you are fighting is trying to win, this means they will resist your attempts to control or submit them with 100% of thier strength speed and knowledge. What gives us the advantage in a real fight is that we have worked up to people resisting our techniques at 100% resistance and have eventually performed these moves on that training partner 100’s of times. This training process gives us practical experience that the untrained person simply does not have. This is what gives us the advantage, the knowledge and confidence that comes from being able to perform a technique on somebody who is trying with all of thier power to stop us and still being successful.