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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Kill the Advance Party

Recently I have been helping on of my students with his rolling reversals from under side control. Doing this of course got me thinking about the importance of not letting the opponent pass your guard in the first place and if he does pass taking action that gives you the chance to roll him off.

As usual when I am teching my imagination ran away with me and I started thinking of silly analogies to help with the teaching points. In this case I said that when your gaurd is passed it is akin to being invaded by an agressive foreign force and the lead arm is the advance party of this force. As in battle, by taking out the advance party you can confuse and disorientate the main force, in BJJ terms by controlling the leading arm you make it hard for the opponent to establish control. The result is that it is easier to regain guard or to setup a reversal.

A few options for working with this include: overhooking the arm, underhooking the arm, double hand blocking/kimura, stuffing the arm and also pillow defence (although this is an entirely separate kettle of fish).

In all cases the task is to prevent the leading arm from establishing control of your upper body, particularly with cross face. Regardless of how this is done the point is destabilise, if through this action you can regain guard the that is the best choice, using anything you need to such as shin blocks and crossovers etc. If you are unable to block the pass but you can control the lead arm, the next step is to hip away and face your opponent slightly then reach your far hand over their back and grab their belt or their lat. With their lead arm blocked you can shuffle round so that you are in a straight line with your opponent and then bridge and roll to take the top position.

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