The Art of Attacking in Jiujitsu

Part 2: Attacking Transitions

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

Today’s article is those who prefer chaos over order.

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

• You can attack pins, or you can attack transitions

• I don’t advise attacking transitions if you can adequately control someone… Much better to control and progress methodically.

• About 15 minutes of video instruction on how I anticipate movement and set up my attacks.

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.

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Guillotines will always have a special place in my heart.

When I first started training, I was hitting them from everywhere.

For a white belt, I saw I had a special aptitude for guillotines so I gravitated towards finding every possible way to wrap my arms around someone’s head and squeeze. It worked quite a bit. I caught a lot of my training partners.

I then developed an appreciation for transitions after I tried to gloat to my first instructor.

“Did you see that guillotine I got on [insert training partner’s name].”

[worth noting, yes, I was that white belt…]

My instructor would brush me off until finally, one day, he asked me “if all you do is catch guillotines, what are you really learning?”

It was a riddle that taught me the importance of exploring other paths in and out of the guillotine and learning jiu-jitsu beyond just grabbing a hold of people’s necks.

I gave it up after this and started developing other parts of my game.

Over the last few weeks, I found myself having fun with guillotines again. I was just playing around with them but started to consider maybe worth developing more. But then, in a recent sparring session, I found some slick kimura transitions inspired by a friend of mine so I started playing with those.

Both the Kimura and the Guillotine happen to be in one of my wheelhouses. This is the art of scrambling. You can set both up from pins but also, you can hop over your opponents guard, effectively creating a quick scramble that leads to a great submission.

I’m convinced that as a white belt, any success I had couldn’t be given to my “positional dominance”. I really had none. I do believe, however, most of my success as a white belt was due to the fact that I was able to scramble better than a lot of my training partners.

Attacking pins is probably the safest, highest ROI way to get your submissions. I don’t necessarily advise creating scrambles if you have good control of someone. But sometimes, you’ll find you and your partner scrambling for good position and in these situations, where there’s almost zero control, you’ll find an abundance of opportunity.