This starts with preventing your opponent from recovering their guard and closing their guard on you. As long as we’re staying out of their guard, we are draining their life bar, fatiguing them. But as soon as they close their guard on us, now we have to spend our energy to get out of it again, while being under their bottom submission threats. Therefore, preventing their guard is the key for effective top strategy. There are 3 main strategies to do this:
Level 2 – Guard Prevention
3 Strategies for Guard Prevention
The sum total of our top strategy is to create a system of crushing top pressure that forces the opponent to eventually give their back or open up submission opportunities as they become more and more desperate to escape as their energy drains.
1 – Re-pass Right Away
- Guard prevention re-pass drill
- Solo-workout bodyweight complex for passing agility and cardio conditioning
- Solo-training on the ground-bag
We have to use timing to level change up to our passing positions (or down their body to the hugging pass) just in in time to keep us out of their guard – right as they are about to close the guard, we are up and out of the way where they can’t reach us.
2 – Running the Hips Flat & Ratcheting Side-Control to Pass to Mount
- Running the hips flat to complete the pass stops them from re-guarding us.
- We should run the hips flat as many times as necessary to maintain side-control and prevent the re-guard.
- If we run the hips flat, win the overhook, and get the seatbelt, then we can always pass to mount successfully.
- Then we score 4 additional points.
- Mount is much more difficult to escape than side-control.
3 – North-South Walkaround – Fence the Legs
- As we pass their guard, they are going to be seeking leg entanglement and to re-guard and prevent our 3-points for the guard pass.
- As we walk around the north-south, we fundamentally are putting our legs as far away from their legs as possible, also allowing us to use our arms against their legs.
- However, as we move more parallel to them, we also fundamentalls give them more opportunity to turn belly-down, but this also can give us opportunity to attack the back, therfore our sprawl → FHL → Back is critical to our North-South.
