10x Your Closed Guard

Understanding Lower Body Dominance in the Closed Guard Position

Good afternoon to all of my closed guard appreciaters out there.

Today’s article is revisits some closed guard simplicity and introduces another idea for attacking the closed guard more effectively.

Here’s a quick summary of today’s article:

• Revisiting Closed Guard Made Simple: Attacking Queues & Posture Control

• Your hands already have a job, use your legs instead

• [Video] How to use your legs to create wedges and angles for attacking

This article is for paid members, so make sure you’re subscribed here. Also, my apologies on the delay. This was supposed to be sent out on Friday but for whatever reason, the video upload took a whole 3 days…

Anyhow, hope you enjoy!

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I’ve got a love/hate relationship with closed guard.

I love how dominant it can be for a position that has you on your back.

On the other hand, I hate how sometimes it can get boring.

It’s such a great control position that inevitably the person on bottom can hold, while attacking, and never let go of the guard.

Plenty of competitions have been won this way (I’ve won a few matches like this myself). Simply get to closed guard and assuming the score is tied by the end, the ref’s decision almost always goes to the guard player. Why? Because in the Closed guard, the person on bottom is almost always seen as the attacking party while the person on top is defending.

Further, the rules of jiu-jitsu tend to favor the guard and why shouldn’t it? The guard is perhaps the position that distinguishes jiu-jitsu from all other martial arts.

Aspects of Control

One of the things that makes the closed guard so powerful is the fact that the legs are wrapped around a person’s body. This controls the ability of your opponent to move (mobility) so your arms can do the work to disrupt posture (stability) and the hands (utility).

Consider than when you’re in guard, you have to worry about three things: your opponent’s ability to move, your opponent’s structural integrity and the use of their hands. In open guard, it’s hard to control all 3 things at once. Closed guard makes that much easier since there is almost no mobility for the top player.

Because closed guard takes away this significant variable, it’s also much easier for beginners to start from. It’s the simplest of the guards to work because it has so much control.

If you want more high value info on the Closed Guard, be sure to check out this old but relevant post. Jiu-jitsu Made Simple: The Closed Guard

The above post is a solid one for understanding how to simplify the Closed Guard as well as how to attack it more effectively.

Once you get past this, however, you have to start considering more tactical (albeit fundamental ways) to attack an opponent who is doing a great job of adequately defending.

This post aims to answer the following problems

1. Having a hard time isolating the elbows in Closed Guard

2. Understanding lower body dominance in the Closed Guard and tackling the major problem people have when attacking

3. The problem of attacking “linearly” instead of creating angles (with your legs).

Below the paywall, I’ll attach a video from an unlisted YouTube channel that will dive into some of these common problems so that you can get the solutions and 10x your closed guard.

Let’s dive in!