December 2022

New Years 2023

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We’ll be moving on from the half guard emphasis at the beginning of the year, but I like this video and I don’t think I’ve posted it on this site before. Jason Scully’s videos are the opposite of Danaher’s: quick demonstrations of moves without long monologues. Sometimes you just want ideas for some options and don’t need a research paper.

By popular demand, we’ll start to dabble in the dark arts. Since I’ve spent nearly all of my recent training time in the gi, I am not fully comfortable playing footsie. I have more work to do on my own understanding of it. To get started, I want to pick moves and positions that complement things we’re already doing and won’t be illegal for everyone in their normal competition contexts.

That brings us to footlocks/straight ankle locks. Here are a pair of finishes. The second finish accounts for positioning that acknowledges heel hooks but doesn’t require us to break IBJJF rules:

Below is my obligatory inclusion of Lachlan Giles. I agree with him that I don’t want people in class to get focused on footlocks from top position rather than working on passing the guard. Still, we gotta start somewhere.

I’m less bothered by leg attacks initiated from the bottom. It feels less like giving up on positioning. Single leg X guard attaches nicely to footlocks, so we can work on transitioning into and sweeping from SLX.

Watch Gers escape the footlock attempt in the middle of his match by clearing the bottom leg. His opponent didn’t step over with his other leg to keep Gers away. Gerson shucked the leg and went directly into a dominant top position. This is also a reminder of why everyone is encouraged to work guard passing more than footlocks. Gerson’s opponent could have taken the top position and worked a pass but he fell back for the foot and ended up getting smashed on bottom for it.

Here’s a version of establishing SLX from half butterfly:

From butterfly:

Leg details from Marcelo on the butterfly to SLX transition and sweep:

More Lachlan on sweeping from SLX:

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bad half to good half

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From my recollection of morning crew folks at the recent tournament, I saw escapes, guard passes, and successful guard pulls, but not successful guard offense. Also, everyone ended up in half guard at some point. Half guard life is real.

We’re revisiting that in class. Most of the things we’re doing have already been covered by previous posts. See: https://halfguardlife.com/tag/half-guard/ for the whole collection. More specifically, we’ve started by working from bad half guard positions into better half guard positions using the Whip Down with the Lockdown and the John Wayne Sweep.

I’ve referenced similar BMac videos before, but I don’t think I’ve shared this one:

If our opponent is very resistant to movements across our body (as in the Whip Down or John Wayne), then we could turn into them in the move Kesting calls the Kamikaze. He also continues with a move to bail on half guard using a butterfly hook and his own John Wayne explanation. We’ll work on those as well:

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