[Private Lesson Vault] The Mental "Hack" to Escaping Side Control
If your side control escapes are not working, you're probably missing this first critical step
“Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical” -Yogi Berra
This is one of my favorite quotes of all time in sports regarding mindset because it seems to poke fun at the over-appreciated aspect of the mental game in sports while also acknowledging that acquiring skills and performing at a high level are equally physical.
Such it is in jiu-jitsu.
I can go on and on about how important or unimportant mindset is in jiu-jitsu but I don’t think either of us has the rest of the year to discuss it.
Instead, in this email, I want to talk about how “mindset” or even your mental state can determine how effectively or ineffectively you will be at escaping side control. This is the stuff your instructors don’t really talk about in class because it’s largely assumed that you will be able to escape if you just perform the technique… Steps 1 through whatever.
BUT
Like I tell my students, if you aren’t in the right frame of mind, getting out of bad positions is going to be exponentially harder.
For example:
How often have you been caught on bottom side control and you’ve felt completely helpless?
OR
How often have you been caught on bottom side control and immediately forgot all the techniques you’ve ever learned to escape?
These aren’t “technical” problems. They’re mental problems.
If you’ve been training jiu-jitsu longer than a month, you probably already know a side control escape. And, since nobody is really reinventing the wheel with side control escapes, I am probably using the same one.
If, however, I’m able to escape and you are not, then you are likely missing something that I have discovered over the last 12+ years.
So what are you missing?
Last week, I taught a couple of private lessons on escaping side control. My students asked me questions like:
“How do you identify the first opportunity to escape?” and
“I know the technique, but I can’t quite seem to get it to work” and
“I feel like I’m missing something when I’m trying to escape. My opponent keeps moving on me.”
I simulated some specific training rounds with me playing both top and bottom side control and we identified one major problem with both students. It had nothing to do with technical understanding…. It was in their head.
The premise of today’s video below will be about the two mental tricks you need to implement before any escape. What you are going to learn is that everyone, left to their own devices on a long enough timeframe will fuck up. You just have to capitalize on it.
Once you have these mental frameworks in place, we start our escape using one of the 3 things I always teach to make your techniques more effective.
Ready to dive in?
Let’s do it!
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