Marcelo Garcia Seminar Notes - No-gi
As you’ll find repeated by anyone who has trained with Marcelo, he stresses very heavily the importance of imposing your game, fighting on your terms and always initiating the action. The lessons from the seminar where to built around aggressively and purposefully engaging the opponent, starting with pulling guard (day 1) or going for the takedown (day 2).
1) Single leg from clinch
You and your opponent are standing mostly upright. He may have a neck grip but don’t worry about it much. Focus on keeping elbow control, pummeling to grip his elbows if he tries to dominately grip yours.
One time when you feel him pull back to try to free his elbow, drop down and hug his leg. So if he pulled back to his left, take his right leg. Go to your left knee and keep your right leg up. Hug his leg extremely tightly, grabbing your opposite elbows/triceps if possible.
There should be absolutely no space around the leg like there would be if you just used a gable grip. Make sure your head is inside (so you don’t get crucifix or guillotined), with your forehead pressed firmly into his side. Keep a strong neck and good posture so they can’t bend you over by pushing on the back of your head. Marcelo said that hugging the leg extremely tightly like this is important when submission are in the game, which is why he does it differently than in wrestling.
With the leg trapped, stand up. Your leg that is to their rear, the left, swings back and you turn to the left. Then you sprawl, dropping your chest and hips all at once, bringing them to the ground. You only need to go to your knees, not completely straighten your legs.
From here, start passing however you want, probably hopping over the leg to side control.
2) Shaking the single leg to rear bodylock
Marcelo admitted that he’s no stellar wrestler and that as a jiu-jitsu guy he’s going to have trouble taking down experienced wrestlers. He’ll get the single leg and they’ll be able to hop around on one foot and keep their balance. This is what he does in those cases.
Hugging the leg and standing with good base, he’ll turn hard to one side and make them hop backwards. Then he’ll turn hard to the other side and make them hop forwards. He is standing in relatively the same spot and turning at the waist to swing them around; he’s not trying to run around them. If he was, they’d just stand in one place and not have to hop around on one foot.
While he’s shaking them back and forth, he’ll feel for when they go off balance. This can be when they’re moving in either direction. When they do, he’ll release the leg and quickly grab around the waist and spin to their back. He gets directly behind them, so his head is not still on their side where it can be grabbed. His arms hug tighly by the hips, and he puts his head to one side of their back.
He stands on his toes so he can stay light on his feet. He doesn’t bring his hips too close or put his leg where they can grab and kneebar it. He also doesn’t put his hips too far away where he’ll lose balance. Find a nice spot in between.
I was making the mistake of putting one of my arms deeper than the other, and he told me not to do this since guys can trap it and toss you over his hips.
3) Jumping to the back from rear bodylock
When the opponent is about the same size as you, you can release the bodylock and throw on a harness as you jump and put both hooks in. This is as simple as it sounds. Basically just jump up on his back. Make sure you grab your hand with the arm that’s under the armpit and that you get your chest in the middle of his shoulders, not too high or too low.
4) Forcing the fall from standing rear mount
So you’re now hanging from rear mount with them standing. Let’s say they are grabbing your wrists to defend the choke and have straightened their back so they are upright. When they stand like this, you have to expend a lot of energy to keep your harness tight enough to not fall off, so you don’t want to hang out here long.
To take them down, simply stretch your hooks and arch your back, pulling their chest, forcing them off balance. This is basically the same as you’d do to break someone down when you’ve got rear mount on the ground. As they start falling backwards, twist to the right so they fall to their side, and so you are able to roll out of the fall more (not landing flat on your back).
People were worried about “But what if he leans forward so you can’t force him back?” Marcelo said that it doesn’t matter at that point since then he’s carrying your weight and you’re not wasting energy. This came with a great demo of Marcelo doing a bellyspin on someone’s back to show that he doesn’t need any grips at that point to stay on.
5) Rear bodylock to the Ricco Toppler
You’ll recognize this from Marcelo’s match with Ricco. He said he does this when the person is too tall for him to just jump up on their back. He said he might do that if they are tired and he thinks he can be fast enough, but this is the standard move.
From the rear bearhug, keep your grip tight and scoot your hip back then jump up and plant both of your feet in the back of their knees. Straighten your legs and pull back to make them fall backwards.
Make sure you get your foot in the middle of the bend of the knee, not to the side, or it will slide off or you’ll kick and hurt their knee.
As they fall, keep tension in your stomach so you don’t fall to your back. You want to end sitting up. Keep your feet on the back of their knees, stretching their legs away. If you let your legs go wide and lose contact, or if you fall backwards, they’ll have a better chance of scrambling or rolling out.
Release the bodylock and take the harness. Now put your hooks in. Marcelo made a point of following that order, since he said that putting the hooks in without the upper body control still gave them a chance to escape.
6) Armdrag to the back
You’re standing but this time your efforts to control the elbows are met with them hunching over and keeping their hips back.
Your left hand grabs the wrist and pull it to your right, passing it to your right hand which cups the back of the triceps. This crosses their arm in front of their body. He locks down this grip so his shoulder is against theirs, but he keeps his hips out from them.
As you do this, your left foot steps outside of their right foot, and your right foot steps so the ball of your foot lines up with theirs.
Then you fall back, pulling them down with all of your body weight, landing on your back. As they come down to all fours, you need to come up and grab their back. To do this, you can’t let go of anything or post on the mat. Just lift your left leg, then swing it down, give you the momentum to come up.
Get to your right knee (which is hopefully hooking inside) and get the harness as fast as you can, left arm under the armpit, right arm over, left hand grabs right.
Glue your chest to their back then fall to the right, pulling them in rear mount.
7) Armdrag to leaping on to the back
This one requires incredible timing and the ability to generate of momentum through movement. I had trouble with it, but I have seen Marcelo get it in competition so I don’t doubt its effectiveness.
You try the armdrag as before, but they don’t come down to their hands and knees. They don’t even take a forward step, which would mean they lost their balance, if just slightly. They just stand their like a rock.
So once you drop down and see this happen, immediately bring your feet to your butt, give their arm another big tug and leap up to your feet, landing on their back with the harness.
Marcelo made it a big point that you not do this if they take even one step forward to catch their balance. If they did that, he would just keep trying to armdrag down to their knees. This move is for when they just base perfectly and you can use this rigidness to launch yourself on to their back.
8) Countering them running away on all fours
So you armdrag and they fall to all to hands and knees, but to escape, they try to quickly crawl forward across the mat. If you tried to come up and grab their back they would escape since their upper body is out of reach.
So as they start scrambling away, twist at the hips and go to your belly down. Grab and hug their near thigh as soon as you can. Come to your knees and try to stand as fast as you can.
If they stand too, take them down with the single leg.
If you get up before they can stand, you can let go of the leg and grab the bodylock around their waste too, then jump to the harness.
If you’re really fast and catch them real early before they can get up, you can release the single leg and jump straight to the harness.