Open your guard

Normally, I just post my thoughts on my training. I mainly use this as a training log. Once in a while I will post breakdowns of MMA fights. Today, I feel the need to rant about a trend I see a lot in MMA and in BJJ/sub grappling. I was watching the Ultimate fighter reality show on Thursday which featured the fight between Jesse Taylor and Tim Credeur. During the fight, Credeur lost the fight mainly because he refused to open his guard. Through out the fight, the BJJ coach for Team Forrest, Cameron Diffley, yelled for him to open his guard and move to butterfly guard. Despite these requests, Credeur rarely opened his guard. When ever he did, he had success and when he closed his guard he ate punches, elbows and hammerfists. While it was frustrating to watch someone, who otherwise showed very good jiu-jitsu, lose a fight like that, I can completely understand it.

While a lot about grappling (and fighting in general)is very natural, sometimes we need to do counter intuitive things to be successful. Opening your guard is like that. We think that by closing our guard and trying to tie up our opponent we are protecting ourselves. The problem is that against anyone who any good at all, a tight closed guard is very easy to defeat. The days of Royce Gracie confusing opponents by being happy on his back are long gone. Every MMA fighter works from inside someones gaurd. Whether the goal is to pass, stand up or just ground and pound from inside the guard, they all practice it. In Jiu-jitsu, you start learning how to pass a closed guard within the first week.

The closed guard has its uses. It works best as a neutral position, where you can take stock of the situation and begin to work your game. If you prefer a methodical jiu-jitsu game, like I do, then closed guard can be a good place to start rather than trying to work off scrambles (although that has to be part of your game as well). The problem with the closed guard is that there are relatively few moves you can do from there. There are a couple of sweeps and if you are doing gi jiu-jitsu, there are some chokes. But that is it, everything else needs you to open up.

The problem I find is that people are afraid of having their guard passed. Being able to work off scrambles (as I mentioned above) helps, as does confidence in your ability to regain guard which means working on your escapes. I had the same problem. The way that I got over it was to start working the feet on the hips guard. I liked it because having the feet there provided me with a barrier that I felt help prevent a guard pass. If you are one of those people who is afraid of having your guard passed, try putting your feet on their hips and working that guard.

A more important question is why are you afraid of having your guard passed? In a fight or competition, the answer is obvious. You don't want to lose. However, you can not win against a reasonably skilled opponent, if you don't open your guard. That is just a fact. Now since you can't open your guard because it will be passed and you will lose, but not opening it means you lose as well, we are at a bit of an impasse. My solution is that you need to open it up in training. I see it all the time and have heard many, many accounts of the same thing. Guys start rolling in the gym and all of a sudden it is the Mundials or the UFC. How many people talk about winning their rolls at practice? Did you get a medal or a belt?

Practice is to learn knew things. To provide a personal example, I am concentrating on Butterfly guard this month. Butterfly guard is very hard to master. It is very easy to pass if you suck at it, which I certainly did when I started. To some extant I still do suck at it but I am better than I used to be. Organisms learn, in part, by experiencing new situations and developing ways to adapt to them. Jiu-jitsu is no different. In the beginning, my guard was passed like a bad case of herpes, easily and frequently. As such, I got lots of work with scrambles and escapes. I also started to learn how to prevent them from passing, I started to hit some sweeps and I started to add an effective guard to my game.

Depending on the night and who I roll with, I may end up winning the roll, losing the roll or just rolling until one of us needs a break. Unless I wrote it here, I couldn't tell you how many taps I got 3 weeks ago. I do know that about 3 weeks ago, I managed to far enough into the half guard sweep I was working on, that my instructor, Adam, decided to go with it. That was a huge cry from where it was when I started. I do know that about a week ago, I sweep my 240 pound training partner, Devon, with a hook sweep for the first time. These are the wins I am concerned with. I am not saying that getting a tap isn't a win. It can be especially if you do it with a technique you have been trying to master. In training, take risks and make mistakes. You have to take risks in fights to do it in the gym and when it comes fight time, you will make less mistakes.