Lately, Trog and I have been dealing with people defending the triangle by wrapping their arm around the hips and waiting for the omoplata. One wrestler in particular had been negating our triangles with this, and his defense to the omoplata was so good that switching to it wasn’t really an option.
We were working on solutions when Trog came up with a great one. He said he’d been watching a ADCC highlight reel and saw one of the competitors run into the exact same situation, and easily handle it using a “backwards” triangle, i.e. locking the legs the wrong way. He uses the position to get their arm out, and actually finishes the match with a reverse armbar from it.
You can see it this great video, between 1:12 to 1:45:
I think this is a great solution, and was also impressed that Trog spotted it in the video, so I asked him if I could share it on my site and he was happy to show it.
You’ve trapped their head and arm in the circle of your legs for a triangle. But before you could cross their arm, they hugged under your hips.
While it is sometimes possible to finish a triangle without crossing the arm, you can feel that they’re locking down your hips to prevent this. With their arm hugging your hips, you could switch to an omoplata, but you feel that they’re prepared for this and have already reached inside their thigh or joined hands to defend.
Pay close attention to the next steps. They involve minor adjustments that are hard to see but they are important.
Push their head to the left with both hands. You need to expose the side of their neck, and shoving their head to the side does this.
Bring your right thigh against their exposed neck.
With your right thigh snug against their neck, grab the back of their head and push it down into your stomach/hips. You are now exposing the back of their neck.
Bring your left foot up and grab it, pulling it to the back of their neck.
Figure-four your legs to lock the triangle.
You’ve now got a triangle on the “wrong” side, but thanks to the adjustments made while securing it, you can actually make good use of it.
You can try using it to finish the choke by hugging your knees and squeezing your thighs together (think Thigh Master). This can put on the same pressure as a normal triangle, with your thigh against one side of their neck and their own shoulder in the other side.
To be honest though, I’ve never had much success finishing anyone this way. It is a horrible position to be in and they’ll suffer, but they’ll survive.
Instead of going for the finish, we’ll move on, using the backwards triangle for the control it offers. You’re going to use it to pry their arm out and cross it so you can get a normal triangle.
Dig your left hand under their arm and gable grip your hands together.
Bridge your hips up and start pulling their arm out. Slide your forearm down towards their wrist as you pull to gain better leverage as you go.
With the triangle locked backwards, you’ve got a better angle to pull the arm out, and lifting your hips applies pressure that makes it easier to open them up.
Keep pulling and shaking their arm out until you’ve freed it.
Bring their arm on to your shoulder.
Trap their wrist at the bend of your neck, like you’re holding a phone with no hands. You can grab their elbow and manually turn it to make sure it’s facing outwards.
Cross your arms so the crook of your elbow is over their elbow. Apply the submission by hugging their arm to you as you expand your chest and arch your back and neck towards. The strength of this move should come from your core, not just squeezing really hard with your arms (though that does help).
To escape, they have to bend their arm and bring it to the other side of your head. That’s fine since they just crossed their own arm for the normal triangle.
Make sure to shove their arm all the way across so they can’t bring it back to the other side and hug your hips again.
Grab your right shin and open your legs.
Step on their hip with your left foot to swivel your hips. Pull your right calf across the back of their neck.
Close a normal triangle and finish like usual.
Nice series. I’ve done this a time or two mainly out of opprotunity but it is nice to see it laid out.
Baret Yoshida also had a counter to people hooking their arm across the leg. He would take both of his hands and locks them across the knee that goes across your opponents neck. He then uses his arms along with his legs to pull his knees together and raises his hips. I’ve tried this and was able to get it to work.