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Never in my life have I seen someone teach what he's doing at the 13:00 mark to escape side control.
Novel Side Control Escape by Pedro Sauer
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Never in my life have I seen someone teach what he's doing at the 13:00 mark to escape side control.
I've seen similar ideas (not exactly the same but pretty close to this) a lot from the Helio side of GJJ. It seems to be a family of escapes that involves hugging the opponent to you close to at least partially trap him vs the standard idea of making space everywhere.
Bluntly I think this family of escapes is not taught often outside of the "invisible jiu jitsu" crew because it is not very effective against skilled opponents. I have only seen this stuff work during really chill rolls when a confident black belt is frustrating a beginner by giving up side control/mount, defending indefinitely with ease, and then escaping seemingly at will after the beginner tires.
In more evenly matched situations, I don't think you can get away with casually lying flat like that without eating some serious shoulder pressure.
I use a type of shoulder pressure choke as a major submission from side control/mount anyway so when I feel someone start this type of escape against me, I just go right for the pressure choke.
Bluntly I think this family of escapes is not taught often outside of the "invisible jiu jitsu" crew because it is not very effective against skilled opponents. I have only seen this stuff work during really chill rolls when a confident black belt is frustrating a beginner by giving up side control/mount, defending indefinitely with ease, and then escaping seemingly at will after the beginner tires.
In more evenly matched situations, I don't think you can get away with casually lying flat like that without eating some serious shoulder pressure.
I use a type of shoulder pressure choke as a major submission from side control/mount anyway so when I feel someone start this type of escape against me, I just go right for the pressure choke.
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Yes. Generally these ideas involving hugging the head though, not the arm.
As an aside, I would say overall the advocates of this posture control from bottom side control are underutilized. Attaining this grip from bottom side control is one of my favorite ways of building towards guard. (Though from bottom side control, you'd want to make sure you're moving your opponent's head towards the rest of his body, and not allowing his head to cross your body.)
Break posture, and use your elbow to block any possible crossface. Your opponent will get frustrated with not being able to properly use his arm.
This video from Ryron shows a similar concept with trapping the arm as well as the head. One of my students went to a seminar with Ryron and Rener once and they spent a lot of time on this idea. It was also done the other way as well (grabbing the head with the other arm and grabbing the lower arm).
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Picture/video? I'm struggling to imagine what you're referring to.
So in side control, the opponent has one arm closer to your head and one arm closer to your hips.
In the Ryron video, he is demonstrating trapping the arm closer to your head. It's also possible to trap the arm closer to your hips (you use your other arm to do that). That trap version is similar to what Pedro is showing in his side control escape video.
In the Ryron video, he is demonstrating trapping the arm closer to your head. It's also possible to trap the arm closer to your hips (you use your other arm to do that). That trap version is similar to what Pedro is showing in his side control escape video.
100%. While there are for sure some interesting ideas here, I don't see how it's robust to your opponent getting up on their toes and dropping the shoulder with intent. A technique has to be resilient against someone willing to amp up the physicality. Fabio Gurgel instilled an early lesson that I keep in mind daily - If you're serious about holding side mount and your opponent can talk normally, you're doing it wrong. They should be gurgling and desperate to escape the pressure. The bottom guy turning his head 30 degrees into you shouldn't even be on the table.
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Great observations. There's definitely a lot of keeping them close to you' style escapes/reversals on the Helio side.
I'm unsure where I stand regarding its effectiveness. At the same time, there are so few examples because there are so few people that have the knowledge, and also compete, and also have it on video to study. I'm want to say we haven't seen enough examples of this stuff attempted yet to make a fully informed judgement call. But there's also a part of me that suspects you're right. But I'm rooting for these style escapes and reversals to work and become more common.
I only started learning some of this stuff as an experienced brown belt and it was very fun to do on lower belts. Some of it really felt effortless and magical but I can't pretend there wasn't a skill gap at play. I'd like to think that with more mat time and experience that I could make it work on other upper belts just as well. But I'm not training right now, so that might be a ways off.
At the very least I've found that some of these escapes do open up opportunities for more traditional escapes even if they fail.
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I'm not trying to be a smart-arse but its not a big stretch to see how combining this with stuff people like Paul Schreiner show around defensive posture easing the Cross-face could be used together.
Some of the posts here seem to suggest they're to mutually exclusive types of escape methodologies but i don't think there's any reason they have to be. All these techniques are just tools in your toolbox, almost none of them will work in isolation against anyone good whether its this type of 'Invisible JJ' or something Gordon Ryan showed 5 minutes ago.
Very few techniques will work in isolation against skilled opponents. This is just one more tool in the toolbox to stretch out your opponents base and create the precious few inches of space.
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Yeah I don’t believe any techniques are “ bad “. Time and place . Even reaching thru to break the closed guard “ gift wrapping the triangle “ has its place .I’m a brown and have used it on some good guys . I’m just postured up big time as I rise up and hand by belt is shooting under their leg same time for a double under if need be . But some wouId say to never reach thru. I don’t believe that . Just , like said , another tool . Plus even if you can’t pull it off you should know a technique to be able to teach it and defend against it .Case in point , Danaher says that the key lock from either side control,half guard or mount is the most low percentage sub ever and percentage wise , catches fewest people in class or tournaments . YET against Mattheus, Gordon spammed the shit outta it in mount to get a bridge reaction from Diniz , straightening his arm out to defend , so Gordon could move it across diniz’ neck to get the arm triangle , nearly nailing it few times .
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Glover Teixeira did this in his last fight against Thiago Santos. Literally reached back from closed guard. (This is about 20 seconds into the second round)
I agree that there is a time and place for this stuff. My point above was that in my experience, the time and place for this stuff is against relatively unskilled and less aggresive opponents. That's still a valid time and place, but it's a limited one that explains why this isn't seen more often.
The example of reaching back in closed guard is another good one. I first ran into that over a decade ago when one of Rorion's black belts trained at our school for a few months. He passed my closed guard with the old school reach back method, and I was pretty stunned that it worked because I considered it "wrong".
At first I thought that maybe there were some secret details that I missed, but looking back now 10+ years later, it really wasn't that. It was the fact that back then I was like a 150 lbs blue belt and he was a 250 lbs black belt. He was just toying with me. When he tried this pass against more evenly matched opponents in the gym, he got triangled.
Does that make the technique "wrong"? I guess it depends on how you define it. I resisted with 100% of my ability at the time, and it still worked on me. However, it's not something I would ever have one of my students working on seriously because there are too many other better options out there to work on instead.
Treating all techniques as equally valid is one of the hallmark features of martial arts that don't work well against resisting opponents. I see this a lot with Aikido. I can hit kote gaeshi on resisting opponents in BJJ from time to time. I use it as a counter to a death grip on the gi lapel. Also one of my blue belts actually won a tournament with a type of sankyo throw from standing about a month ago. The guy death gripped his lapel, he spun under and trapped the wrist, ended up with a 2 pt takedown, and then tapped the guy from side control shortly after.
That being said, despite having a few useful techniques and concepts in there, Aikido seems to be crippled by the belief that "all techniques have a time and place." Whenever I trained with them, if a technique seemed impractical or of limited use, in Aikido the belief was that you just needed to train it more. This led to a lot of people who seemed to waste decades practicing relatively ineffective stuff that just didn't work very well no matter how long it was trained. None of it worked on me despite me being BJJ white/blue belt at the time and relatively small size.
Contrast that with Judo. In Judo, there are quite a few impractical techniques in the syllabus. The first throw in Nage no Kata is a knee dropping uki otoshi variation that is almost never effective against a resisting opponent. I've literally never once seen it used successfully in sparring or competition in that kata form.
The difference is that in Judo, no one told me that I just needed to practice that uki otoshi variation more and I was missing invisible details. They just admitted right off the bat that it wasn't a very practical throw and told me to work on tai otoshi instead. The culture was very different there. Judo has 40 throws in the Gokyo, but they clearly recognize that a subset of maybe a dozen or so throws are the dominant techniques that work best against resisting opponents.
All techniques having a time and place is a half truth. The statement itself is technically true, but the full context needs to be something like: "All techniques have a time and place, but some techniques have vastly more practical times and places than others. And we should spend our limited training time mostly focused on those more proven techniques."
The example of reaching back in closed guard is another good one. I first ran into that over a decade ago when one of Rorion's black belts trained at our school for a few months. He passed my closed guard with the old school reach back method, and I was pretty stunned that it worked because I considered it "wrong".
At first I thought that maybe there were some secret details that I missed, but looking back now 10+ years later, it really wasn't that. It was the fact that back then I was like a 150 lbs blue belt and he was a 250 lbs black belt. He was just toying with me. When he tried this pass against more evenly matched opponents in the gym, he got triangled.
Does that make the technique "wrong"? I guess it depends on how you define it. I resisted with 100% of my ability at the time, and it still worked on me. However, it's not something I would ever have one of my students working on seriously because there are too many other better options out there to work on instead.
Treating all techniques as equally valid is one of the hallmark features of martial arts that don't work well against resisting opponents. I see this a lot with Aikido. I can hit kote gaeshi on resisting opponents in BJJ from time to time. I use it as a counter to a death grip on the gi lapel. Also one of my blue belts actually won a tournament with a type of sankyo throw from standing about a month ago. The guy death gripped his lapel, he spun under and trapped the wrist, ended up with a 2 pt takedown, and then tapped the guy from side control shortly after.
That being said, despite having a few useful techniques and concepts in there, Aikido seems to be crippled by the belief that "all techniques have a time and place." Whenever I trained with them, if a technique seemed impractical or of limited use, in Aikido the belief was that you just needed to train it more. This led to a lot of people who seemed to waste decades practicing relatively ineffective stuff that just didn't work very well no matter how long it was trained. None of it worked on me despite me being BJJ white/blue belt at the time and relatively small size.
Contrast that with Judo. In Judo, there are quite a few impractical techniques in the syllabus. The first throw in Nage no Kata is a knee dropping uki otoshi variation that is almost never effective against a resisting opponent. I've literally never once seen it used successfully in sparring or competition in that kata form.
The difference is that in Judo, no one told me that I just needed to practice that uki otoshi variation more and I was missing invisible details. They just admitted right off the bat that it wasn't a very practical throw and told me to work on tai otoshi instead. The culture was very different there. Judo has 40 throws in the Gokyo, but they clearly recognize that a subset of maybe a dozen or so throws are the dominant techniques that work best against resisting opponents.
All techniques having a time and place is a half truth. The statement itself is technically true, but the full context needs to be something like: "All techniques have a time and place, but some techniques have vastly more practical times and places than others. And we should spend our limited training time mostly focused on those more proven techniques."
I bet Pedro Sauer or Kron Gracie could land this side control escape against you.
I had a feeling this response would come up eventually.
I'm a BJJ black belt that competes at the bigger IBJJF tournaments in Masters still (COVID has been an issue but hopefully the 2021 schedule comes up soon). I came up in that competitive type of style (my coach is part of Atos and coached their biggest names at tournaments). So are most of the other black belts I train with and hang out with.
Rickson has had his invisible jiu jitsu set out for a while now, and nobody is talking about it. Because it just isn't something that is effective enough for us to react to. It's not changing the game.
Contrast to say Danaher's stuff. Everyone talks about it all the time, and everyone has to react to it. Some people think Danaher is a genius; some people think Danaher is a weird guy with a knife fetish that is overly pedantic. Regardless, everyone spends time familiarizing themselves with his stuff because you will get crushed if you are unaware. The stuff coming out of DDS is a true threat.
Nobody changed how they did mount because Rickson showed the "invisible" detail of how to move your head out of the way on the upa. We still just keep the mount the same way we always did, and it still works against that detail too.
I know I've already said a lot but I was thinking more about the Kron example. That is actually very illustrative of why I approach things this way.
A potential match against Kron someday is basically what I have to train for. I'm Masters 2 Black Light this year. Kron was Middle and I think a bit younger, but it's entirely possible that things could move around and he may be in my bracket sometime down the road. Even if it isn't Kron, a lot of semi-retired BJJ legend types end up in my brackets so I have to be prepared for that.
I am no famous BJJ legend. I am obviously at a disadvantage in these match ups. But they are going to happen, and if I'm just going to throw up my hands and think "I will get crushed" before I even get out there, then that is the day I will stop competing. Instead I need to approach it as a maximization problem to give me the best chances of winning with what I have.
What I would try to maximize in preparation are the strategies and approaches taught to me by the Atos guys and reinforced by other guys I have trained with from Alliance, GB, DDS, GFT, etc. They all have a similar thread which is to focus on what is proven in competition. Just narrow down to that, train it hard, believe in yourself, and that will give you the best chance to win. Whether you actually win or not is not guaranteed, but you want to give yourself the best chance.
If somehow I got to side control (obviously no guarantee), deep down yes I would hope that he might try this escape. I would hope that because I believe in my side control pressure, and I feel it would give me the best opening for it.
Is it possible I could be surprised by the potency of the escape and lose the match because of it? Absolutely. That's a risk every competitor takes every single match. But once that starts happening in matches, competitors take note of it and start adapting. It is no longer invisible or a surprise at that point.
The belief that the practical results of matches should guide our training focus is pretty core to all competitors I have talked with on it, all the way up to the legends.
Also as far as exceptional examples of athletes with certain moves goes, my instructor coached Davi Ramos for his ADCC when he got that flying armbar on Lucas Lepri in the finals. It was such an awesome submission and one of the coolest ever in ADCC history.
It also wasn't a spur of the moment thing. That flying armbar was planned for weeks. They all worked out the strategy together and drilled it relentlessly. The action in the match before it happened was all just a set up for the sudden flying armbar attack.
Despite the obvious and dramatic success of the strategy, my coach never taught us to do it ourselves. I once asked him why we never tried it. He simply said "Because no one else can do it like Davi does. So the rest of us just need to stick to the proven stuff."
While there are downsides to sticking with the proven, more "visible" stuff, I really do believe that in the end that's the best strategy 99% of the time. And it was the approach of the top coaches in the sport that really solidified my belief on this.
The reason I even chimed in on this post in the beginning is because I had seen this stuff before. When I trained under my main coach, Pedro's main school was about 10 min away from us. I went from colored belts to black belt with at least three different guys that spent several years training with Pedro and eventually switched over for various reasons. They all knew this type of stuff, and we spent time talking about it and playing with it in rolling. Ultimately we all came to the conclusion that although it has a time and place, it's not main focus type of stuff.
We could all be wrong, but I chimed in because I saw some other seasoned guys had never seen this before. It is indeed pretty rare to see it. I was trying to put it in context based on my experiences with this stuff. Pedro has done a ton for BJJ, has a wealth of knowledge, and tons of guys I respect are glad they got to train with him for some time.
But I feel there is a reason why these techniques did not take off more widely in BJJ despite them being in fact very old school techniques that date back to Helio.
A potential match against Kron someday is basically what I have to train for. I'm Masters 2 Black Light this year. Kron was Middle and I think a bit younger, but it's entirely possible that things could move around and he may be in my bracket sometime down the road. Even if it isn't Kron, a lot of semi-retired BJJ legend types end up in my brackets so I have to be prepared for that.
I am no famous BJJ legend. I am obviously at a disadvantage in these match ups. But they are going to happen, and if I'm just going to throw up my hands and think "I will get crushed" before I even get out there, then that is the day I will stop competing. Instead I need to approach it as a maximization problem to give me the best chances of winning with what I have.
What I would try to maximize in preparation are the strategies and approaches taught to me by the Atos guys and reinforced by other guys I have trained with from Alliance, GB, DDS, GFT, etc. They all have a similar thread which is to focus on what is proven in competition. Just narrow down to that, train it hard, believe in yourself, and that will give you the best chance to win. Whether you actually win or not is not guaranteed, but you want to give yourself the best chance.
If somehow I got to side control (obviously no guarantee), deep down yes I would hope that he might try this escape. I would hope that because I believe in my side control pressure, and I feel it would give me the best opening for it.
Is it possible I could be surprised by the potency of the escape and lose the match because of it? Absolutely. That's a risk every competitor takes every single match. But once that starts happening in matches, competitors take note of it and start adapting. It is no longer invisible or a surprise at that point.
The belief that the practical results of matches should guide our training focus is pretty core to all competitors I have talked with on it, all the way up to the legends.
Also as far as exceptional examples of athletes with certain moves goes, my instructor coached Davi Ramos for his ADCC when he got that flying armbar on Lucas Lepri in the finals. It was such an awesome submission and one of the coolest ever in ADCC history.
It also wasn't a spur of the moment thing. That flying armbar was planned for weeks. They all worked out the strategy together and drilled it relentlessly. The action in the match before it happened was all just a set up for the sudden flying armbar attack.
Despite the obvious and dramatic success of the strategy, my coach never taught us to do it ourselves. I once asked him why we never tried it. He simply said "Because no one else can do it like Davi does. So the rest of us just need to stick to the proven stuff."
While there are downsides to sticking with the proven, more "visible" stuff, I really do believe that in the end that's the best strategy 99% of the time. And it was the approach of the top coaches in the sport that really solidified my belief on this.
The reason I even chimed in on this post in the beginning is because I had seen this stuff before. When I trained under my main coach, Pedro's main school was about 10 min away from us. I went from colored belts to black belt with at least three different guys that spent several years training with Pedro and eventually switched over for various reasons. They all knew this type of stuff, and we spent time talking about it and playing with it in rolling. Ultimately we all came to the conclusion that although it has a time and place, it's not main focus type of stuff.
We could all be wrong, but I chimed in because I saw some other seasoned guys had never seen this before. It is indeed pretty rare to see it. I was trying to put it in context based on my experiences with this stuff. Pedro has done a ton for BJJ, has a wealth of knowledge, and tons of guys I respect are glad they got to train with him for some time.
But I feel there is a reason why these techniques did not take off more widely in BJJ despite them being in fact very old school techniques that date back to Helio.
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Ah yes, I’ve seen this move all the time at my gym, for many years.
We call it the technical paintbrush.
We call it the technical paintbrush.
That's a whole lot of wishy washy paragraphs to say you or may not get caught with this escape. Regarding your Danaher speech, Kron Gracie slept your boy Garry Tonon with old school Rickson Gracie jiu jitsu. One of very few people who subbed everyone on the way to ADCC Gold.
Were Roger Gracie an active competitor today, he would wreck all these new trends with basic old school Gracie jiu jitsu principles like he did for years. You better put some respect on it.
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