Rilion Gracie black belt with 20 years Jiu Jitsu experience, academy owner & professor, I teach Jiu Jitsu through the lens of the obvious yet hidden.
Joined February 2009
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If you've been following and it's shaped how you think about grappling, this is a way to bring it into your own training.
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One of my favorite parts of rolling in the gi is passing while they still have grips.
I’m comfortable standing in front of them because I’m ready to brace and make their sweeps miss. Instead of breaking grips, I try to unclip their frames and deny their feet from getting to my hips and arms. They can’t hang well without both griping and framing.
To get ahead, make grips on their pant legs and start playing a mini game I call up, down, left, right. Each hand works independently, probing for a direction to push or pull their leg that makes their frames less useful.
You still have to be ready to overfit and underfit submission attacks, especially when your stance gets staggered. Getting staggered is okay, and sometimes unavoidable. Don’t panic. Accept where you are and be ready for the next part of the exchange.
If they upgrade their grip, like getting to a lasso, you have to unwind it or drive pressure into it so the grip becomes uncomfortable. Make it cost more energy than it’s worth.
When you move this way, natural passing routes open up without having to map everything out ahead of time.
Try passing without breaking grips. You might be missing one of the most fun parts of rolling in the gi.
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This is true. AB is not thinking. But here’s the difference between grappling and striking. Both are pattern recognition, but striking reads patterns through sight, grappling reads them through touch.
Sight is lineal, sequential, one frame at a time. Touch is everything all at once, simultaneous, instant.
Touch is way faster, which is why a striker uninitiated in grappling has low odds. Arman knows exactly how silly this matchup is.
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Look at the mastery here.
Really cool to see the unconscious competence. He’s rehearsed those movements to such a degree that the subconscious can execute those patterns automatically. Those neural pathways are grooved in deep.
That’s why Arman said “[to counter like that] you have to do from young age, huh?”
It has to be driven to subconscious perfect, your conscious reaction time is insufficient to see it coming and respond before your opponent lands.
Have to get completely out of the way. Conscious thinking will only interfere. Trust your subconscious and let it take the wheel. Many things are like this. x.com/tantehenia/status/2063…
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Real notices real
Your Jiu-Jitsu is refreshingly “improvisational”, and I mean that in the best possible sense. I’m nowhere near your level, but I’ve been a lifelong guitar player with a very heavy interest in jazz, fusion, and other improvisational music. I’ve recently noticed a lot of similarities between JJ and improvised music, both in practice and in the conceptual principles underlying them, and you’re one of only a handful of people producing JJ content who seem to approach things in this way.
You’re not rigid, hyper-mechanistic, formulaic, or needlessly aggressive. You react to emergent possibility, grappling in a way that mirrors musical improv, and you seem to look for uncertainty rather than just trying to eliminate it via brute domination. Just a mildly autistic observation🙂.
You also don’t exude performative aggression, douchebaggery, or other forms of the insufferable obnoxiousness that seem to be so ubiquitous in much of the JJ world these days, at least as it pertains to what is presented online anyways. I’m less than a beginner and probably always will be, but watching your rolls has improved my overall mindset toward JJ and it’s helped confirm some of my suspicions in regard to the aforementioned shared maxims. That’s been super helpful for a casual, twice a week JJ sort of guy like myself.
I know this reads as pretentious glazing from some rando on the internet, but it’s absolutely sincere. I’m looking forward to reading your book and hopefully dropping in if I’m ever in your area.🙌🏻
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Been digging this route that keeps showing up with one of the locals. Haven’t seen it anywhere.
He does a great job shutting down the floating pass by locking up double unders, but that opens the door for this double over body lock.
Big fan of the double over body lock because it takes away his ability to frame on my head and neck. Solves one of the biggest downsides of the traditional body lock.
You gotta try this one.
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How good grapplers read you.
They don’t guess what you’re going to do. They make you guess what they’re going to do.
In Jiu Jitsu, you gather information from contact. The way they grip. The way they frame. The way they carry their weight. The threats they respect. The threats they ignore. And the Mixup stage is where reads are easy because now your opponent is forced to choose between multiple problems at once.
A Mixup is when you put yourself within reach of more than one Basic Option at the same time. Go behind. Tip over. Pass the legs. Submit. In a Mixup, Two or three options become available at once, and your opponent can’t defend all of them. So they have to choose. And the moment they choose, they tell you what to do.
One threat is easy to defend. Three threats stacked together leads to information overload. They hesitate. They over extend. They commit to the wrong problem. That’s the read.
Don’t just try to read people from neutral. Get to the Mixup. Stack the options. Make them answer a question that has layers.
You are not guessing what they will do. You’re are making them guess what you’ll do, and making a read off that.
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