This morning at Crossroads BJJ’s 6am jiu-jitsu class we continued working from the closed guard with this class focusing on two sweeps and how to transition to the kimora or shoulder lock if the top jiu-jitsu player defends the sweep.
One of the main focuses from inside the closed guard is breaking the posture. Breaking the posture in Jiu-Jitsu means that you are preventing the top bjj player from both striking you or from improving their position by passing the guard. Because this is one of the main goals of the closed guard the top player will often times lean back to far in-order to prevent being pulled forward, so if we can not pull them forward we will push them backwards following one of the main concepts of jiu-jitsu, using your opponents energy and movement against them.
After drilling the sweep from the closed guard we started to discuss what to do when the top Jiu-Jitsu player defends the sweep by leaning back into us. Of course this allows us to break the posture which was our original goal, but we can also start using the broken posture to form our own attacks. In this class our attack was the kimora and the arm drag. Depending on which side of the body our Jiu-Jitsu training parter puts there hand down on will determine the technique we use. If they keep one arm on each side of the body we begin to look for the kimora and if they put both hands down on the same side of our body we begin to set up an arm drag.
Having a system of techniques that we have drilled over and over again reduces the amout of time our brain requires to select a technique. In this case we have an answer no matter where the top Jiu-Jitsu player puts his hands and with this knowledge and proper drilling we are not hesitating thinking about which technique we should be using, we simply react.