After my last tip about unorthodox BJJ positions I had some people contact me and tell me that I’d left out the North South position from my list of the 6 fundamental BJJ Positions.

I’ve actually addressed this issue in my Beginning BJJ Package, and so I’m just going to quote from there:

“The boundaries of the positional variations we’ve just discussed are a bit vague, and some people might classify certain variations as separate positions. For example, some people might consider the North-South position to be sufficiently distinct from Side Mount to deserve its own category, as opposed to what I’ve done in this book (i.e. calling North-South position a variant of Side Mount). The terminology isn’t too important; to quote Bruce Lee, “…it’s just a name, don’t fuss over it.“

The bottom line is that no classification system is perfect. It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with biology, economics, chemistry or grappling: sometimes the things you are trying to classify will absolutely refuse to be forced neatly into a convenient niche. To deal with this problem I encourage you to eventually create your own classification system, and use this system to describe the unique subset of positions, techniques and strategies that YOU use when YOU grapple.”

So that’s the north-south position cleared up (I hope). I consider it to be a form of side control, but you can call it whatever you want!