Musings from the BJJ Gi #7; Lesson 7

This time, the standing technique we covered was guillotine defence, and the ground technique was the hook sweep. Fortunately for me, these techniques were still virtually identical to the original form which I learned them, via Gracie University online. The guillotine defence involves using a thumbless grip to hold onto their choking (guillotine-ing) wrist/forearm, with your outer arm, to help prevent the choke from sinking in. To assist this further, you also tuck your chin, and make what we (myself and my training partners) have dubbed ‘Lizard Neck’, where you kind of flex your neck muscles by exposing as many of your bottom row of teeth as possible. Your inner arm (the one closest to your opponent’s body) reaches up and over the top of their far shoulder, so that your inner forearm and the palm of your hand is now hugging their back on the far side. When your opponent tries to lift and apply the guillotine to your neck, you kind of hop your legs around to the side of their body opposite their choking/guillotine-ing arm, so that your stance is now perpendicular to their stance. Then, with a move my Gracie Garage training partner Ash and I dubbed ‘Elvis-ing’ (due to the similarity of this move to Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’ dance moves), you kind of strike the back of their knee with your own knee to collapse the sturdiness of that leg, while simultaneously pushing down with the arm that you still have hugging over the top of their shoulder/back, and you shuffle a couple of steps in the direction that they are falling, and squat/crouch down as they go to the ground. Note; they still have your head locked up in the guillotine, and you still have your hand gripping their wrist to protect your neck from the choke, it’s just that now you are side mounted on top of them, and both of their hands are more than likely now trapped between your two chests. The technique for getting them to release the guillotine, is to take your other arm (previously hugging over the top of their shoulder, but now available for other uses), slide that hand across their neck, and grab a hold of the shoulder of their guillotine-ing arm. You use this grip on their shoulder as like an anchor point, and then slowly apply pressure with your forearm on their neck. This is very uncomfortable, and it takes virtually no pressure at all to make them let go, at which point you pop your head out from under their arm, and gable grip your hands together and attain full side mount.

The hook sweep, I like the hook sweep, it seems to be a very simple and effective move. From the position of you being on your back, and you opponent standing in front of your feet, not really pressing forward, but just standing with a strong base, with one of their feet further forward than the other. You put both of your feet on their hips and grab their ankle (the one closest to you) with your hand on that side (thumbless grip). With your other arm acting as a helmet to protect your head from punches, you shuffle your hips closer to the side of the ankle you grabbed, take your opposite foot (i.e. if you grabbed their ankle with your right hand, then your opposite foot is your left foot), and hook your foot in behind their knee on that side. So you now have one foot on their hip (same side as the ankle you grabbed), your other foot is hooked behind their knee on the opposite side, and you have a hold of their ankle on the same side as the foot you have on their hip. The foot hooked behind their knee has to be ‘sticky’, being that if they try to step their leg out of the hook, you ‘stick’ your foot to it and follow it where it moves. To apply the sweep, you simultaneously push forward with your foot on the hip, pull towards yourself with the foot hooked behind their knee, and also pull towards yourself with the hand holding their ankle. This is quite effective at putting them on their back pretty swiftly, at which point you get up in base, and then decide what the next appropriate move is depending on what their response is.

I feel that this lesson clicked quite well for me, as I remembered both moves pretty clearly, and they’re also kind of fun ones to practice. That’s all for this one, but gonna hopefully get another 3 sessions in this week. There are 36 different techniques in Combatives, and we have to do each lesson 3 times before we can be tested. I’m not going to describe each technique in detail all over again once the lessons start repeating, but I’ll just cover all of them properly once, and after that it will just be more of a commentary on where I’m up to and how it’s all going.
Until next time,
Cheers!

• David.