Last night during the Crossroads BJJ Fundamentals class we worked on our submissions from the guard position. The guard is what separates Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu from other martial arts. In the early days of the UFC Jiu-Jitsu gave Royce Gracie the ability to fight off of his back which is something almost nobody had seen outside of Brazil. Before this it was always viewed that if the fight went to the ground the person on the bottom was losing. However if you know Jiu-Jitsu you have the ability to defend yourself in any position on the ground.
In last nights class we drilled two of the need to know submissions for the guard, the armbar and the triangle, and the best thing about these two attacks how effortlessly they can be used together. The defense to the armbar leads to the triangle and the defense to the triangle leads to an armbar. So by drilling these techniques until we can switch between them smoothly and without hesitation we can trap the top Jiu-Jitsu player in an almost endless loop until they are forced to tap to one of the submissions.
Once we drilled switching between the two submissions we spend some time working on countering the defense to each of the submissions with subtle adjustments to our positioning in order to make it harder for the top bjj player to escape. It is always good to have a counter to an escape but the main goal of Jiu-Jitsu is always the submission, so we must find a way to tighten up our techniques so that escaping them is extremely difficult and eventually impossible.
If you are interested in learning more about the strategies brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has developed to become one of the worlds most effective martial arts stop by and check out one of our fundamentals of Jiu-Jitsu classes and experience how easy it is to learn and how much fun yoI’ll have getting an amazing workout.