Posture Breaking – Bottom of the Closed Guard

When you have someone inside your Closed Guard there shouldn’t be anything more important to you than breaking down the opponent’s posture. Doing so helps to control them, and to set up sweeps and submission attempts. The sooner you grasp this single important concept the sooner your Guard skill increases. Period. Let’s get into it.

Ideally, you want to have your legs as high as possible to break the opponent’s posture down. This can be down with your legs under the opponent’s armpits or with one leg over in the more advanced High Guard position.

Getting an arm around the opponent’s neck, and another arm overhooking their arm, will help secure the position. Then pulling them down breaks the posture. Of course, use your legs as well. Don’t leave them out of the fun. However, it’s not always as easy as that. So let’s look at some other various posture breaking methods you can use:

· Sit up, grab behind both of the opponent’s elbows, flare out their elbows and fall back. This is a good method when the opponent’s arms are back on your legs/knees, or they are working open your legs.

· If the opponent just has their hands on your chest with their arms straight pushing into you; reach behind their arms, grab their elbows and then flare out their arms.

· Sometimes you can bring your arms under the opponent’s arms, either one arm or both arms, and then bring your knees towards your own chest.

· If the opponent is working one of your legs with their elbow, reach up and across with both of your hands, grab their upper arm, drag it across and fall back. This armdrag will open up a path to their back.

· Another cross-body method has you slipping your hand cross-body under the opponent’s armpit and popping your hand up behind their shoulder. Now clasp your hands together and fall back bringing the opponent with you.

· Against a lapel grip, cross grab their sleeve and then swing your opposite hand under their arm and figure 4 your own wrist. Apply a double high block style movement. Then wrap your arm around the outside of the opponent’s arm. Finally wrap around their neck with the other arm.

o The NoGi method would be to slide your hands under the opponent’s wrists and lift straight over your head. Now pull with your legs and throw their arms past your head.

Try out some of these posture breaking methods during your rolls to see what works for you. If your opponent doesn’t have good posture inside your Guard they won’t be effective enough to apply much of their normal game.

Learn. Drill. Roll. TRANSFORM!