How the young wolf staved off the old lion

  • August 27, 2017

Sometime ago, I invested some time in watching tape, and I found one match in particular interesting.

It was the latest in the Xande Ribeiro vs Felipe Pena mat battles, and it came down to a razor thin margin. In fact, no point were scored at all. But I was riveted because of the lessons in guard retention.

Case in point:

A few minutes in, Xande, the old lion, forced the half guard and immediately started to smash and pass but he ran smackdab into a wall.

Why?

It’s because Pena threw up a frame so hard that you could see the grimace on Xande’s face.

That frame started as just straight palm to the jaw and then transitioned to the cross collar with the thumb down. The forearm then became an immovable wall that Xande just couldn’t get through no matter what he did.

It’s such an incredible example of how one frame can make all the difference.

And I’ll tell you something that you must understand.

Knowing when and how to frame is absolutely essential for preventing and escaping from bad situations.

In fact, I emphasize that principle when it comes to side control escapes. The battle for effective frames is a micro battle that must be won, and I’ll show you how to do it when someone is crushing you in cross body.

Get your fill here:

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Most men would have let the sharks devour them

  • August 26, 2017

A few days ago, Unbroken became another of the few movies that I would enthusiastically watch more than once.

It’s the story of Louie Zamperini, who was a US Olympian who later became a bombardier in World War II. And while searching for a missing B-24 over open water, several hundreds miles from Oahu, Hawaii, his plane suffered severe mechanical failures and crashed into the sea.

Of the 11 crew members, only three survived, and Louie was one of them.

But they were stranded.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing…. but ocean.

They only had a few chocolate bars (which didn’t last one night), a few half-pints of water, a flare gun, sea dye, fishhooks, and a fishing line.

Imagine that.

No food. Little water. And no hope of rescue.

Many would give up.

And in fact, one of them started panicking right away. Another had a significant head injury.

Louie realized that he had to be one to keep the morale high, and he started telling stories of how great it would be back home, with their families, slowly savoring warm home cooked meals.

It was a constant mental battle.

One day passed, two days, three days, and on…

All they had was hope.

It was so bad that they had to depend on rain to survive. And they lucked out when it came to food too.

One day, a bird landed on their raft, and they were able to catch it and kill it. They had no way to cook it though and the flesh was just rancid. It made them all throw up, but they were able to use it as a bait to catch a fish.

They kept them going for a bit longer.

Thirty days in though, they lost one to starvation and dehydration.

The grim reaper was hovering over their shoulders. But they still had believe and endure their own slow, painful demise.

And then they were “rescued”.

But enough on that.

This wasn’t some random story.

There’s a reason I shared it.

Throughout the movie, there was a maxim that Louie repeated more than once. It’s something that his brother told him when he was a young buck, and it served to inflame his desire to live even at his lowest points.

It was simply:

“If you can take it, you can make it.”

It calls to mind that great speech in another movie I like a lot, when Rocky Balboa told his son that it’s not about how hard you can hit but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.

Louie could have said fugk it after 40 days of feeling his life ebb away with no hope of survival, but he chose to desperately cling to life until the very last moment.

And while the stakes are much, much lower on the mat, that’s same kind of determination I want for myself.

It doesn’t matter if I’m down by 30 going into the last minute.

It doesn’t matter if I got taken down and passed in the first minute.

And it doesn’t matter if everyone expects me to lose to the guy standing across from me.

For every moment, every second, and every minute of the match, I can still win.

And that principle applies to far more than just competition (obviously).

Use it as you will.

On to some business (uh oh I spelled it right) stuff.

I’m still in Vegas, and later today, the Grand Prix will be going down. I’ll be live streaming some of the matches up on the book of faces, and the OLDMAN coupon will stay active until tomorrow.

Once it’s gone though, who knows if it will ever come back.

Just a word of advice though, it works on every last one of my courses, but while I’ve been out here, the one that I have gotten the absolute positive feedback on has been the “Half Guard Trickery” course.

It’s filled with more than just techniques. In fact, even if you think no one can touch your Half Guardian card, there is still something that you can learn about the little micro battles and positions that exist in the game.

Reach out and grasp desperately for half gyardian life here:

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Crossface ain’t shyt

  • August 25, 2017

A few days back, I yapped about how preventing the cross face used to be all the rage among half guard “aficionados”.

That tactical choice stemmed from two things.

First of all, they hated being crossfaced, and that’s completely understandable. Good guys can make that position absolutely horrible.

(Feeling that shoulder grinding hard into your face can drain you too.)

It takes a special kind of chap to endure all that punishment and still refuse to give up the pass.

Then second, many half guard passing strategies (at the time and still to a degree) were built around the crossface. So by preventing it, you also decreased the possibility of having your guard passed.

Where they went wrong though is in their solution to the problem.

Instead of dominating the body in such a way as to make the crossface hella difficult, they chose to focus on actively blocking the arm itself.

To do that though, the mobility of the position has to be sacrificed.

Hell, it’s the same thing that happened with the lockdown.

The strategy locks you into a very limited path of offense. Don’t get me wrong though. It’s not completely wrong. If you play it well, you can make it work, but once you commit yourself to that path, you’re putting your half guard on death row and destroying all attempts at appeal.

You will run smackdab into a wall.

It’s just a matter of time.

Doubt me not on this.

Anyway.

Crossface ain’t an issue if you understand rotation control from the bottom.

Case in point:

There’s a grip in the gi that can be used to force your opponent to partially rotate away from you. They won’t even be able to touch you with their bicep.

No way. No how.

Slaughtered.

Here’s something that’s even better though.

No grip required or anything. You can do it in the gi or out of it.

Ready?

Stop playing the game in the midrange. I harp on it all the time. I know. It’s important.

Your head must, must be tight against your opponent’s body on the same side as your underhook. Breaking that rule is dangerous, but when you hold true to it, the crossface is no threat.

You could even say that it ain’t shyt.

Enough on that.

For more half gyardy knowledge, slide on up in here:

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Handing out punishment in the tilt matrix

  • August 24, 2017

Sometimes, it astounds me how many people to still fall victim to my hip tilt trickery.

Yes, yes I know that I make them react to the wrong thing, but still… sometimes it just seems like cheating. And there is sooo much that can be done off of that one threat too.

For example, as soon as that hand touches the mat, you can:

* Snatch up the kimura on the near side. (That elbow often disconnects from the side, as all of their focus goes to stopping the sweep.)

* Push the face away and underhook the near arm for a devastating crush. (I even like to bring my knee up in front of their face to isolate the arm and make the finish even more vicious.)

* Reach down and pull their ankle in. (It absolutely obliterates their base and makes finishing the sweep easy, no matter what post they have with their hand.)

* Swirl around to the far side and hip bump. (This is another easy way to finish the sweep, and as a bonus, mount is so so easy to get right away.)

*Snatch up the kimura on the far side. (I picked this up from Mahamed Aly a few years back, and it’s straight up devastating. In fact, I even hit far too easily yesterday.)

* Wrap em up in the loop. (It’s shocking how many people allow the cross collar grip in kneeshield. Good thing though, that I have no qualms about making them suffer for it.

* Smoothly transition back to the closed guard. (Some guys react to the tilt by long stepping their leg back to increase their base. It’s a gift. Not only is the closed guard wrapped up for you like a present on Christmas day, but there are also attacks you can hit right after the transition.)

And that’s not all. When you make your adversaries react in ways that you can easily predict, there’s almost always some way that you can take advantage of their reaction.

You just have to think about the game in that way.

‘Tis one of the reasons some of my attacks are downright devious.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about these half gyardy stuff, my “Half Guard Trickery” course awaits.

Here’s the link:

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The experience left a bad taste in my mouth

  • August 23, 2017

Back in my purple belt days, I had an experience that still annoys me to this day.

It happened not that long after my promotion, and the scene of the crime was a Grapplers Quest hosted up in PA.

First of all, you should know that when I did local tournaments, I signed up for everything. I wanted all the experience I could get. And at purple belt that meant jumping in the shark tank in No-Gi, where all the purple, brown and black belts swam.

And that’s where it happened.

It started in my weight division, after I won my first match against a big and strong Russian. Hah, he wasn’t ready for the half, and once I swept, his doom was sealed.

In the final, I went against a brown belt who was playing an odd game. I just didn’t realize it until it was too late.

He pulled guard on me, but it didn’t feel like a good guard. It was loose. Open. And it didn’t take me long to pass at all.

I was up. I was winning.

But then he did something that made no sense at all. He stretched his legs out and laid out completely. Nothing was standing in the way of me taking mount.

It was a gift!

I couldn’t resist.

That was one of my positions. I was confident that I could finish there because even back then my no-gi ezekiel was straight fire.

So I went for it….

But then suddenly, he came alive. With explosive energy, he bumped my hips upward, at the very moment I slid over to mount, and shot one leg through my legs and around to leg reap.

Once there, he transitioned to the heel hook.

I tapped.

Argh!

It was frustrating but I had no idea how to defend it. In my academy, we had never worked on it.

That’s not the worst thing though.

In the absolute, we met again. And this time, I was more cautious. I raked up points and tried to submit from side control but it was no go.

Time was ticking. Victory was in sight.

But then I did it.

I couldn’t resist.

In the room, I had built habits around going after the mount position. And in a moment’s lapse, I went for it again.

The result?

Absolutely the same.

He heel hooked me again in the same exact way.

It was straight robbery, but I could only blame myself.

Don’t make my mistake. Learn the ins and outs of every submission. You must learn how they function and how they can be stopped.

Nothing else will give you as much confidence on the mat.

If you know without a doubt that you can defend submissions, it will allow you to truly unleash your game.

And one of the very best ways to make yourself more impervious to submission is to study setups. You want to be see an attack coming from a mile away. And if you can consistently….

Whoa…

It becomes so much slip through threats like an eel in water.

And if you would like a little help in the form of principles and tactics, there’s a place you can go.

It’s right here:

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