The Art of Attacking in Jiujitsu: Part 1

On Attacking Pins [Plus a deep dive into mount attacks]

Good morning to everyone who believes the best defense is a good offense.

Today’s article is for people who are tired of always being defensive and want to learn how to generate offense. Defense is great but at some point, you gotta start learning how to attack, right?

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

• The two ways to attack

• The quick formula for Attacking Pins

• Attacking the Mount [15 minutes of video instruction]

  • Controlling the Mount

  • Attacking the Mount

This article is for paid members, so make sure you’re subscribed here. Also, as usual, if you subscribe for a year, I’ll send you both of my books (The White Belt Survival Guide AND Jiujitsu 201 for free). If you sign up for a year, please be sure to email me with confirmation so I can send them to you —the process is manual.

---

My white belt was frustrating me.

Earlier that day, I had taught him a private lesson. It was his second lesson with me.

In his first, a few months back, I recommended he go down a defensive rabbit-hole. His problem was that he was getting submitted all the time and couldn’t figure out how to defend.

I showed him some defensive postures. Then I suggested he check out some of Priit’s defensive stuff as some homework.

In today’s lesson, we talked about his study of defensive postures and some new challenges that had arisen. His new complaint was that though he’s not getting submitted anymore (rarely), he is having problems getting back to offense.

I told him just because you’re good at defense doesn’t mean you’re good at escaping. And just because you’re good at escaping doesn’t mean you’re good at getting back to offense. In my eyes, just like offense and defense are two different things, so are escaping and defending.

For him, the problem was he was great at defending himself from whatever bad position he was in but could never find ways to get back to his guard or to a top position. In other words, he wasn’t getting submitted as much but was still in bad positions.

So we worked on positional escapes.

Later on in that class, I chose him for a sparring session. It was a small class so I went around the room and chose each student to spar with.

The first two minutes were rough.

He told me he went deep into Priit’s defensive stuff but I didn’t realize how deep. He went all in. Apparently positional defense was all he’d been working on the last couple of months.

Passing his guard and getting to pins was easy, but submitting him was more difficult than it should have been.

A few things I noticed:

1. He was quick to get into his defensive postures as soon as he was in trouble.

2. He was incredibly disciplined at making adjustments to keep himself safe.

3. Anytime, he’d attempt an escape, he’d go back to defensive posture when I countered it.

It was frustrating… in a good way.

About two minutes in, I was controlling the entire match (yay me) but couldn’t get the finish. It was an interesting riddle. It excited me.

I realized I was jamming a square peg in a round hole trying to pin him for the submission so I went with another option.

You see, there are two ways to catch submissions. And you need to understand both.