The Underhook as a "Position"
I’m sitting there, staring at these two kids grappling. They’re 4 or 5 years old and I can’t seep to wrap my head around how hard it is to teach them the concept of Underhooks.
It’s a takedown specific training session and one of the kids keeps jumping right into a headlock. Over and over again, he keeps going straight for a headlock so he can try a Koshi Guruma(?). Not too sure what he’s going for but he keeps getting taken down by the other kid.
Between each takedown, I give him coaching.
“Hey, you need to go for your underhooks.”
I demonstrate what underhooks mean. It doesn’t matter because when he shakes hands with his training partner again, he goes right back for that headlock and gets taken down again.
This is the day I realized how immensely challenging it is to teach underhooks and coach it to kids (and adults).
I realized there’s seemingly something about the underhook position that gets lost in practice. In other words, I can go on and on and on about the importance of getting underhooks but during live training, for most people, it’s a secondary thought.
Just the idea of thinking you’re about to pass the guard without an underhook supersedes the importance of this one, seemingly small technical detail.
It’s interesting to me over the years of teaching and training jiu-jitsu, how many positions have been lost simply because a person missed underhooks. I’ve adjusted and honed my approach to teaching them several times over the course of the years and I think I figured out the best way to teach them.
Create Instruction that FOCUSES PRIMARILY on Underhooks as the theme.
In other words, instead of teaching a technique that uses an underhook as a detail (IE: “here’s a guard pass and step 3 is the underhook”), change it to creating an underhook as a first step (IE: “Here’s a guard pass using your underhook. Because you need the underhook, that’s your first step”).
Therefore, my goal any time while teaching underhooks is to show my students that there is no takedown, pass, back-take, etc without an underhook. And if there is, the chances of success are very low against skilled opponents.
The reality is underhooks are POWERFUL. And if you’re not using them to your advantage, you’re going to make jiu-jitsu much harder than it needs to be for yourself.
So, the first thing we need is to
A) Understand why underhooks are so important
and then
B) Figure out how to get them.
In today’s email, I’m going into a brief intro on WHY underhooks and the importance of looking for them. I’ll also talk about how you can use the collar tie to open up the underhooks from a standing position and then we’ll go into how that relates to a seated position. Then I’ll show some of my favorite passes from here.
Let’s dive in!
[As usual, this email’s for paid subscribers. Hit that subscription button and check to see the rest. Also, if you’re interested in a 4 week free trial, you can purchase a copy of my second book, Jiujitsu 201 here at this link (It’s a first draft, not finished. Needs some formatting and design and yes, you’ll receive a finalized copy when it’s finished late August or early September)].
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