It’s almost a curse word. It’s the worst part of class, next to warm-ups. You may wish you could skip it and get on to the fun stuff.
Yet drilling is a necessary and important aspect of learning, regardless of how loved it is. You’ve got to build muscle memory somehow.
The disdain for drilling likely comes from what it entails: repetition. To some, this might as well be a synonym for “boring”. And that’s what it is when you approach it as a chore, instead of a valuable tool for improving.
If you drill like a robot, you’ll no doubt find it dull. You’ve got to invest thought into the activity to truly benefit. While I can’t promise it’ll make drilling any more fun, I think I can give helpful advice on how to make it more meaningful.
These are the questions I ask myself when drilling to keep my mind active.
Hips Always
The hips are king. Practically every technique and skill in BJJ (or any sport or physical activity) is built around the hips. You can never go wrong by analyzing what your hips are doing.
You may be surprised to find how many moves come down to the hips. A collar choke or a guillotine may seem to be all in the arms, but the setups don’t work and real leverage doesn’t come until you know how and where to use your hips.
Examples
Is my hip movement smooth enough?
Is my hip placement correct?
Did I rotate my hips far enough?
Are my hips heavy enough?
Gross Motor Skills
Moving outwards from the core, you can look at the next largest elements of the technique: what are your limbs is doing?
Try paying attention to each limb individually, making sure it plays its role to the fullest. Look at them altogether and see if they’re working in sync. Tie this …
The draw of this journal has been its constant tutorials and techniques. Some of you may have been disappointed lately, with the frequency of updates slowing down and fewer tutorials being put up.
As you may have figured out, this journal is largely a reflection of my personal interests. I only share techniques I use, and I only talk from my experience. So as my focuses change, so too does the direction of my journal.
And it’s been one of the best things I’ve done in a long time.
Perhaps because of this, I’ve been worried about what people are actually doing with all of the information on this journal. My concern is that they’re getting lost in the euphoria of learning new techniques, or that they’re just collecting techniques for the sake of collecting them, but not putting in the work needed to improve their game or effectively incorporate new moves.
Because of this, I think it’s time to bring more attention to how to learn, not just what to learn.
I confess. I consume inordinately large amounts of BJJ information and techniques: dozens upon dozens of books, DVDs, magazines, blogs, forums, online tutorials and more. This is in addition to regular instruction. Its my nature to dig into a subject, compile research and compare data from different sources.
Over the last several months of focusing on no-gi chokes, I have tried to tie them together by finding fundamentals that apply to the wide range of techniques and situations. Here are the fruits of my labor.
Note: By no-gi chokes, I’m specifically referring to front chokes like the guillotine. For the sake of clarity, we’ll consider the rear naked choke and arm triangle to be in a different category.
Some chokes, like the brabo, blur this distinction, but its mechanics are more easily taught when split up this way.
When I first approached this subject, what surprised me was how many different ways something as “basic” as a guillotine is done. Shouldn’t it be as easy as “grab head, crank”? Yet it seemed that everyone had their own unique version, with a particular grip they like, a certain spot on their arm that does the choking, how they applied finishing pressure, and so on. Was one way better than another, and which should I use?
Rather than overwhelming myself with a mountain of seemingly disassociated techniques, I’ve tried to catalog them so I can compare their similarities and differences. From this, I’ve then tried to distill the key ingredients and find a common thread.
I owe Jon Gunnar for sharing this first simple but important lesson with me. Two basic mechanics hold true for every guillotine or no-gi choke from the front:
The crown of their skull is forced down.
Your arm is raised up into their neck.
The first point could also be described as bending their neck forward (towards 90 degrees) or making their chin touch their chest. These all describe the same situation. The crown of the skull is the spot with the best leverage to do this, so I phrased it that way.
(These rules also hold true for many gi chokes, with the …
Some of you have been worried about me. You’ll be happy to hear that I didn’t die or abandon this journal—I simply got a job.
Thankfully that is coming to an end soon, and I’ll be back on here again with more techniques and articles (and hopefully footage, whenever I get a video camera).
In the mean time, I thought you may be interested in hearing what my other interests are outside of jiu-jitsu. And even if you’re not, indulge me this one actual “blog” post about my personal life.
I finished The Tipping Point and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The first explores how social trends and ideas suddenly spread and become popular. The second looks into rapid cognition and snap judgments. I felt The Tipping Point was the better book, but Blink has its good moments too.
Next on my roster for brabo choke analysis is Baret Yoshida.
Let’s get straight to the footage. What he shows is similar to the multitude of videos I’ve already posted, but he does a few things differently that I like.
(If you have the book that goes with this DVD, check out how he does technique 34 in it. It should be the same as the video above, but he does a different one, more like Christian’s from reverse scarf hold or Bjoern’s setup from where you wrap the near arm and head then circle to the other side.)
Combining this pass and the brabo choke makes perfect sense, since one of the most common counters is for the person on bottom to get the underhook and try to come to their knees, which puts you in position to get the choke.
A detail I particularly like is how Baret teaches that, when you take the first step towards them, to block their elbow with your knee. This crosses their arm even more and traps it. As with all triangles, the more you can cross their arm the better.
You can see Baret getting this exact setup in sparring:
I’ll gloss over the beginning since it’s not what I’m interested in: Baret starts in the clinch, shoots for a single and gets the takedown and spends some time in the guard.
What I’m paying attention to is when he stands in their open guard. He shoots his knee …
Continuing the brabo choke theme, I’d like to go over another aspect of this technique.
In the Shinya Aoki footage I analyzed previously, we saw how he sat out and ran himself “under side control” to apply the choke, but he ultimately finished it from the top.
Sprawling to finish it is fine. It’s the most common way it’s taught, and in some cases, like when you’re stuck in half guard, the best way to do it. But what I want to focus on is switching your base and running towards them to get the submission instead.
I have footage of a Jeff Glover match that illustrates this perfectly. It’s fast, so you may want to watch it a couple times. If only we had slow motion replay.
Jeff Glover in Grappling All-Stars
Jeff armdrags into a single leg then swings his leg and sits to take them down.
With both of them down, Jeff quickly gets an underhook and comes to his knees, controlling their near leg, preventing them from getting up too.
Jeff drives into side control and gets a crossface as his opponent struggles to block him. They reach across with both hands and shove Jeff’s hips to try to keep him away.
Jeff shoots his left hand under the out-stretched arm and around the head, grabbing the back of the neck. His right arm goes behind the head and he grabs his own biceps.
Jeff switches his hips to get in position to finish the brabo, but his opponent tries to catch him in half or full guard. Jeff “hides” his legs, bending them and keeping them hooked so he can slip and circle them out. At one point, Jeff almost takes mount when his opponent tries to trap his legs but can’t.
Like Bjoern, it was Shinya Aoki that inspired me to work on the brabo choke again. His instructional has my favorite material on the move, and I don’t even speak Japanese. He has very clean technique so it’s easy to follow, and language isn’t a factor in the competition footage.
One of the matches shown on this DVD contains a wealth of information on the brabo, but you’ve got to watch it closely. It’s easy to overlook since it’s a short match, lasting little over a minute.
Thanks to the magic of youtube, we can breakdown the match together:
Shinya Aoki vs Pedro Akira in Campeonato Japones 2005
Aoki leads off with a beautiful takedown that lands him in knee-on-belly. He holds this for a few moments before Pedro gets on his side and starts turning to his knees.
The moment Aoki feels he’s losing knee-on-belly, he jumps into position to get a front headlock as Pedro rolls to his hands and knees. He shoots his right arm under the armpit and around the head and closes the arm triangle before Pedro has a chance to go for a takedown or pull guard.
The initial grip isn’t as deep as he wants it, so Aoki keeps adjusting it, pushing his choking arm deeper and grabbing his sleeve to climb his hand up his biceps. With his free hand, he grabs the fabric on Pedro’s back and uses this to cinch it tighter.
After the referee fixes a gi across his face, Pedro tries to pull butterfly guard but Aoki sprawls so his weight keeps Pedro …
The brabo choke (or whatever you want to call it) is a technique I’ve been practicing on and off for a while now. Recently, with my focus on no-gi chokes, I’ve once again devoted myself to analyzing and developing it.
Since the beginning of my training, I’ve had a habit of collecting grappling information online and cataloging it. This article and its brabo choke tutorials, photos and descriptions gathered from all over the internet are a result of this compulsion.
This choke, like it’s cousin the anaconda, has gone in and out of vogue several times in recent years. Its rise in popularity tends to follow a victory in competition. The problem is that with each new appearance, it takes on a new name.
Grappling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu suffers from horribly disorganized and confusing terminology. I believe this can be a fairly serious (or at least annoying) obstacle to beginners. It also makes broadly sharing techniques difficult since everyone seems to have their own vernacular. You have to dig through a maze of Japanese, Brazilian and English—much of it slang—and deal with different arts having their own names for the same thing.
What’s the difference between a kimura, a bent armlock, a keylock, a double wrist lock and ude garami? Not much, besides the name.
We won’t solve all the problems of grappling taxonomy today, but I will try to make sense of the brabo choke and its various names.
As I said in my first batch of notes, what made this Marcelo seminar special was that he was given a chance to teach aspects of his game that aren’t already covered on his instructionals or previous seminars.
I’ve seen Marcelo criticized for teaching the same seminars wherever he goes, so that if you’ve been to one, you’ve seen them all. I don’t think this is his fault. Most people want to learn his signature moves and that’s what they pay him to teach, so he’s stuck showing nothing but armdrags, taking the back, RNC and x-guard. They’re all excellent techniques, but it can get tiring to teach the same stuff over and over again.
For example, at the first seminar, I had a chance to watch part of his private lesson with the hosts. They were asking him about techniques straight off his DVD. They also got to choose the topic of the seminar, so he mostly taught material I’d seen in his instructionals before. It was all great material, and it was nice to have him personal teaching it and correcting you, but it seemed somewhat redundant.
At the start of the second day, Marcelo said he was happy to get to teach us what he does in his everyday training. He said that it’d get boring to just do armdrags, x-guard and taking the back in sparring. He said he’s …
I got back yesterday from a two day Marcelo Garcia seminar down at American Top Team in Hollywood, FL. It was a great experience, learned a ton of great techniques and had a lot of fun.
The theme for the whole seminar was giving Marcelo a chance to teach the material he uses in his everyday training but rarely gets to teach since most people only want him to do seminars on his signature moves. Marcelo said he was grateful to get to take a break from teaching the standard armdrags, RNC and x-guard. He said he never holds anything back, but there are aspects to his game that he doesn’t get to teach much since he’s still developing new material that people don’t know to ask to learn. This was especially true of the second day, which revolved entirely around omoplatas, which is a game few people realize he plays.
The first day focused on taking the back and finishing the RNC, which you’d expect from a Marcelo seminar. But what made this different than usual was that Leo Kirby, the host, asked Marcelo to go into aspects of his game that aren’t given as much fanfare, like the crucifix and the finer points of using his hooks and maintaining back control. Leo has been to four previous seminars and as many private lessons with Marcelo, and yet almost everything in this one was brand new to him.
Here are my notes so far. I know at least one person at the seminar was glad I was there so they wouldn’t have to take their own. “I’ll just read yours online.”
Pulling guard from clinch to butterfly guard sweep
You’re in the clinch with your right hand underhooking (palm on the back) and your left hand cupping the elbow. Your knees are …
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