Once you begin to learn Brazilian Jiu-jitsu your going to want to know how to stop people from using their techniques against you. Every position on the ground is ranked from best to worst and since the goal of jiu-jitsu is to put yourself in the best position possible and provide your training parter with the least opportunities to submit you, you are going to need to learn how to prevent them from escaping. In todays 12pm Jiu-jitsu class we continued working from the same counter we were drilling during Tuesdays noon jiu-jitsu class, countering the elbow escape.
After drilling the counter to the elbow escape we began using that counter as a way to set up the paper cutter choke and discussing the queue’s of when you will attempt the choke versus when you will move to take your jiu-jitsu training partners back as we did in Tuesdays Class. Proper technique selection makes all the difference in jiu-jitsu, since the right submission performed at the wrong time is the wrong move. This basically means that we can know all of the details to a particular technique but if we do not understand when we should be applying it our training partner will easily escape.
We ended the class with some positional drilling where we add some resistance. This allows us to see if we are applying the technique correctly and at the correct time in a controlled learning enviorment until everybody feels comfortable with the technique and have made the proper adjustments to make sure that it will work when it actually matters, either in a competition or in a self defense situation. In both cases the person you are attempting to submit will not want to be submitted so you must be able to break through their defenses. This training methodology is what separates Brazilian Jiu-jitsu from other martial arts, the ability to test what we are doing in situations where we are getting 100% resistance, keep what works and discard what does not.