So my wife and I are whitebelts. On Sundays our instructor has been doing a series on single-leg-X with sweeps into ashi with ankle locks (yes we're a mostly gi school). This is fun material, but I have not been focusing on it outside of those Sunday classes because I have a lot of other shit to work on.
My wife is the smart one in the family though, and she was confused about some of the leg positions. So I suggested she study the entire leg entanglement system and try to just get the positions straight (and then teach them to me). I said "Before even looking at transitions or submissions or defense, let's just get the positions figured out." So she started watching videos....
It quickly became apparent that it was confusing to us both. "Ok which one was game over and which one was honey hole, or is that 4-11?" ... "wait wait, is that 50/50"? So we continued to study and decode, and we finally came up with a way to describe these positions to each other so that we could get them mapped out.
I wanted to list our terminology here in the hopes that some other poor whitebelts trying to figure out all these leg entanglements might get some help from it.
We've discovered there are 6 primary positions. So rather than give them unique names, we gave them all ashi styled names. We realize there are not the typical names, but we're using them for now while we get the whole mess decoded.
So the first three positions are when the opponent's leg is outside your body:
Ashi
Outside Ashi (my inside leg comes outside)
Inside Ashi (my outside leg comes inside) (reap)
Now we switch the opponent's leg from the outside to the inside, we call that "Cross" because the leg has come across the body.
Cross Ashi
Cross Outside Ashi
Cross Inside Ashi
Then we practiced just moving between them and calling them out as we went through them. And then we would call them out when the other person did them to us.
then after all that when we felt like we understood those 6 positions, we appended the more common names:
Ashi
Outside Ashi
Inside Ashi (game over)
Cross Ashi (not sure what people call this one)
Cross Outside Ashi (50/50)
Cross Inside Ashi (honey hole, 411, the saddle, Sankaku).
Then we watched some MTS episodes about leg configurations. It's clear there are more variables, just in the positions. Like what side am I laying on, are my legs triangled, and so on.
So clearly we have just begun this epic journey. We are still trying to figure out all the positional configurations. Then there are transitions, entries, submissions, defenses, other-side leg... and then there is learning to use them against a resisting opponent.... wow.
One thing is for sure, the leg game is significantly more complicated than your standard Jiu Jitsu. Guard, Mount, Side-Mount... those are not as befuddling as all this leg complexity. But we're loving it! We're both pretty smart, and if we're struggling just to understand the most basic positions, then many people are probably not learning it at all.
I think I'm starting to understand why so many advanced old-school practitioners don't want to mess with the leg game... it's complicated as shit and they will get tapped a BUNCH trying to learn it from someone who knows it, even if that guy is a bluebelt.
Time for some humble-pie old school blackbelts that dont know a honey hole from a game over! :)
Anyway let me know if I'm fucking any of those positions up! Hopefully looking at them as 6 ashi variations will help someone else as much as it helped us.
