Tonight during our Team Training BJJ class we began working on opening the closed guard from the standing position. In order to be a well rounded jiu-jitsu player you need to be able to pass the guard from both standing and the knees and the same goes for breaking the closed guard. In BJJ breaking the guard means making the person unlock or uncross their legs from around your hops.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or BJJ has so many techniques and is evolving so quickly that you need to have more than one way to open the guard. If you can only break the closed guard from the knees that may work in your gym, however at a tournament where people have different games your opponent may be very good at defending those guard breaks, so you will need to vary your approach and become more unpredictable.
In todays class we focused on maintaining the proper angle when in the closed guard when we are on our knees and then achieving the dominant gripping. In Brazilian Jiu-jitsu details make the difference and if we can begin our control with the grips we can prevent a number of possible attacks. Once standing we discuss how to apply pressure with our legs and hips to jam the guard player and force them to open there guard. Once the we open the guard we maintain our pressure and move to consolidate side control.