My instructors view on half guard lockdown

[Arman Fathi]

I was not taught how to stretch in JJ as a new student. They have us jogging around the mat and shrimping and shit, but no stretching at all. Coming from a TKD background where we spent 15 minutes formally in every single class stretching, this seems crazy to me.

See Z-guard utilizes the feet as points of contact on his hip & thigh. It's a perfect guard for managing distance and timing your shot for the double underhooks. From there, you can take a quick turn straight into lockdown and hit an electric chair. But utilizing the feet and knees as points of contact are going to have literally a thousand different names, but they're all built into the same principles and follow the same template. Don't ever feel at odds with your instructor or combative. Always listen and take his knowledge. Keep building the pyramid, and eventually your bottom game and top game will come together as a unit and you'll become super comfortable. Give it about 2 years of consistent training and it'll start to get really fun.

[ErikLavigne]

It's not so much of a bad thing to pull lockdown if you're constantly attacking. Where I can see people getting annoyed a little bit would be if you just got it to prevent their pass and make their life difficult rather than attack and transition to other half guards or even full guard. Think of guards and points of contact as lines of defense, and lockdown as a tool that can bail you out of a desperate situation while also giving you some attack options. It shouldn't be the first line of defense. Start with full guard, work out to butterfly guard, de la riva, reverse de la riva, x-guard, you name it. Basically any guard that utilizes the feet as the line of defense. After that, there would be knee-shield game. You could swim for underhooks, build the pyramid, get triangles/armbars, and always recover to earlier lines of defense. There no shame in that. If he's more than progressed past your feet and he's coming past your knees, then you can start entering half-guard, deep-half, and lockdown game. Think of each layer of your game though as lines of defense. If you're not that good at any one particular thing, butterfly or closed guard for example, you identify that as a hole in your game, you review resources, drill it out a little bit, try it in rolls, and analyze. But it can understandably be frustrating if a guy is always pulling lockdown and it takes up the majority of the round. It should be used liberally on the offensive front, and defensively only to get on your side and to generate movement, but sometimes it's even ok to let it go in non-competition simply to generate more movement and collaboration.

osu

Yes this is pretty much what my instructor said. He said I am letting people blow past my levels of control and distance and forcing my opponent to put all their weight on me. So I am excited to learn these levels of defense as you put it.

[bobby rivers]

Your coach hates us, cuz he anus.

[ErikLavigne]

Your coach hates us, cuz he anus.

I'd agree that he may be peanut butter jealous bro

[apygav]

send him the link to Metamoris 3 with the comment 'sit on this!'

[HerbChao]

This recent Gracie breakdown on street fights is a good reference too (they do talk a little about HG).

[Brian Tupper]

We have been cross-training a lot at a local Gracie school because they have a lot of high-level guys, and we want to work out with as many high level folks as possible. They are very self-defense based, and sort of look down on sport focused JJ.

While rolling with one of the purple belts, he immediately started to comment on my lockdown with, “Man, that’s tough to get out of. I’ve never experienced that before”. These were positive comments, but they quickly turned sour, “I’d hate to do that while someone was trying to punch me in the face though, not very effective”. I responded and said, “Throw some fake punches if you don’t mind…I’d like to see if I can defend them”. As soon as he raised his hand up to posture for a punch, I whipped him up (forcing him to post his hand to the mat), got an electric sweep. We went through about 10 iterations of this, each time I was able to either sweep, move to dogfight, wrap him up (5.0 sweep style), etc. When we finished our roll, he made some more comments about the lockdown and finally asked if I would mind staying after class and showing him some of it. This was positive; however, some other dude in class walked passed us and pointed at me and said to the purple belt I had been rolling, “yea, he sure likes to wrap that leg up and hold on don’t he?” Not really an accurate assessment in my opinion.

Fortunately, the resident black belt and brown belt are a bit more open minded (although still primarily self-defense based). The brown belt especially wanted to learn the defenses to the lockdown, as he had immediately seen the effectiveness (no brown-belt wants to get swept over and over by a blue belt, right?). We were happy to oblige, because the better their defense becomes, the better our lockdown will have to get.

I hope your training partners will learn to embrace the efficiency and effectiveness, and start learning how to defend it instead of expecting you to use lockdown as a last resort. To me, the beauty of the lockdown is that I can control a huge aspect of what’s happening from my back (or thereabouts). I can clinch and hold them on top of me, I can whip up and get their hips away from my hips, I can whip down and steal an under-hook, I can do a variety of things to make them so uncomfortable that they give me some space to take advantage of. I think any position where you can dictate where your opponents hips are is not to be simply brushed off as a “last resort” position.

[Craig Murray]

Does the same advice I'm getting a lot of in my RG thread apply here as well?

Erik is a whitebelt, at a school who does not teach lockdown, teaching himself some 10p techniques. I would expect the advice to be similar. Things like:

1. your partners may not respect you
2. learn what your instructors have to offer
3. wait until you are bluebelt
4. don't teach yourself 10p techniques

I'm not being sarcastic or anything. The situations just seem quite similar to me but I haven't heard quite the same response.

[ErikLavigne]

Craig the big difference is I used to do 10p. I did 10p 2007-2011. Military move forced me to stop, then kids, then crappy gyms that didn't offer no-Gi. Moved to Texas and now 5 years later I'm getting back into. I'm not teaching myself 10p, I'm reverting back to muscle memory and previous training.

[Craig Murray]

Craig the big difference is I used to do 10p. I did 10p 2007-2011.

What rank where you when you left?