Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gives us the ability to defend ourselves in the worst situations, but as we begin to improve in the Martial Arts we begin to recognize bad situations earlier and then we can prevent situations from going from bad to worse. In our No-Gi BJJ class this week we learned how to do this in the guard position. By recognizing the movements required for the bottom player to start an attack, either a sweep or submission we can que in on these initial movements and react sooner, before we are in a high risk scenario.
In this No-Gi BJJ class we focused defending 3 of the more common ways a jiu-jitsu guard player will start to launch an attack. These 3 ways are breaking our posture, moving to open guard to start attacking with thier legs or to begin attacking our arms by getting the top player to over extend them.
By regognizing the first movement that each attack requires we can work to shut the guard player down and prevent them from even getting started. By keeping ourselves in a neutral position we can spend more of our time working to pass the guard and less time defending submissions. This changes the tone of the match, when you are attacking you are winning, if you are actively passing the jiu-jitsu guard player must defend, if they are defending they are not attacking and if they are not attacking they can not beat you. This is the case of sonetimes the way defense is a good offense.