In order to have a good guard you need to be able to stop people from passing it. Of course if you move first you can attack first and make your Jiu-Jitsu training partners react to you, but if your opponent reacts first you need to be able to move in a way that puts the top Jiu-Jitsu player back in your guard. If you don’t have a way to recover your guard you will simply get passed and be continuously working out of bad positions.
In this class we worked 2 different techniques recover the guard all involving hip movement and understanding angles. in Jiu-Jitsu you must fight for strong angles and this means using your grips to create blocks that prevent your opponent (in this case the top Jiu-Jitsu player) from simply running through your defenses. if you want to prevent your guard from being past you must move your hips in the correct direction to take away the top Jiu-Jitsu players advantage.
After we discussed how and why we need to move our hips we looked at how this movement can cause the top player to over commit in a rush to pass. The bottom bjj player can use this over commitment to his or her advantage which is a common theme in martial arts, using your opponents energy against them. In the first guard recover technique we worked turning the top players overcommitment of energy into a sweep and in the second we were able to transition into a triangle choke.