You know what's frustrating?
When your opponent knows exactly what you're going to do.
Jiu-jitsu is largely a game of knowledge and the application of that knowledge. If you can identify exactly what it is your opponent wants to do, you can put yourself in positions that give you an advantage that first allows you to apply your knowledge and also decreases the likelihood that your opponent can apply theirs.
Such it was during the last sparring session I had with Bryson. We were fresh off some underhook videos (that you can find here and here if you missed them) and this knowledge was of course primed in his brain. The result was a couple of minutes of be trying to get my underhooks but also failing miserably (a black belt against a white belt, no less). This goes to show two things:
1) Underhooks are powerful at all levels
2) Sometimes, no matter how good you are, a fundamental concept will not work against an opponent who is not giving it to you
In this case, Bryson was able to defend the underhooks and keep me from being able to pass effectively. So what did I do? I adapted.
This is the idea I like to hammer away about "the path of least resistance". You always want to look in this direction because as I've said time and again, jiu-jitsu is hard enough. Why not make it easier?
So I made it easier for myself and consequently had to go in a different direction with this week's email, which worked perfectly actually.
In this video, I'm going to talk about PRESSURE.
This will be the sparring narration for this series on pressure that I wrote about here. In this video, you're going to see how I counter and negate Bryson's searching for underhooks while also using pressure to find mine (eventually) after killing the mobility in his hips.
This video is important because people generally don't know how to apply pressure --especially not at the beginners level. Far too much energy gets wasted trying to apply pressure by not operating on the right levers. What people think is "pressure" is actually just tension and this is the complete opposite because there is ZERO tension when using gravity as your friend.
Ready to dive in? I thought you'd never ask! Let’s apply pressure below!
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