One of the most common sayings in Jiu-Jitsu is “Technique over Strength”, this essentially means that you want to correctly position your body so that you are using the majority of your body both muscularity and structurally to attack or “weaken” your bjj training partners body. Over the last several weeks we have been working on understanding the open guard, specifically the spider guard. The spider guard is a great guard where you use your arms and legs to entangle our Jiu-Jitsu training partners upper body and from there work a number of different sweeps and submissions. However if our training partner begins to posture up and use good technique against us if we do not switch our position we will end up using an excessive amount of strength to keep the position and in most cases you end up losing the position anyway.
Starting with our spider guard drills in order to improve our movement we then began having the top Jiu-Jitsu player crowd us as they postured up. As the top player postures up driving in with their hip the position of our legs in the spider guard begins to weaken, it is in this case where we begin to switch to the De La Riva where you can use your legs to manipulate the position of the top Jiu-Jitsu players legs and cause them to fall. In today’s class we worked a very basic sweep that allowed us to come up to either a leg drag position or to knee on Belly passing the guard entirely.
If you are interested in learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and live in the Groton / New London area near Connecticut College, Mitchell, the US Navy or US Coast Guard base check out our schedule, find a class that works for you and start learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu today! Crossroads BJJ located in Waterford, CT offers classes throughout the day so no matter what your schedule, you will always have time to train!