Early this morning, while still in bed, I started daydreaming about various counters to the knee cut guard pass.
This is one of the most dominant guard passes in jiu-jitsu and a favourite of several of my training partners, so it’s something I have to deal with all the time.
As I was lying there, musing about different ways to shut down that guard pass, something was bothering me. A niggling forgotten memory that that I couldn’t quite bring to the surface. A word on the tip of my tongue kind of feeling…
And then it hit me!
Suddenly I remembered a great knee cut guard pass counter that I used to do a lot which I had totally forgotten and stopped using.
A technique which I am going to reincorporate into my gi game immediately.
And try to figure out how to apply it to no gi as well!
Which brings us to the larger point…
In jiu-jitsu we often spend a LOT of time learning, drilling and playing with new techniques.
This is totally normal – new techniques are fun – but it means you might miss some low hanging fruit.
That low hanging fruit are the techniques which you used to do and worked great but then, for whatever reason, you stopped using them.
Sometimes old techniques get abandoned because they were never high percentage to begin with. Fair enough; your game has to evolve, and means that some low percentage techniques need to get pruned.
But sometimes perfectly good techniques get left behind just because you forgot about them.
Or you stopped using those moves because all your training partners became wise to them.
Or maybe you just got distracted by the next shiny thing (SQUIRREL!!!).
So I challenge you to think about the techniques that once used to be your bread and butter but have now completely fallen off your radar.
These could be submissions…
Or guard sweeps…
Or pin escapes…
Or guard passes…
Or ways to break posture…
Or guard pass counters…
Or ways to get a certain grip…
Or takedowns…
Or submission escapes…
Or whatever.
If you’ve been doing jiu-jitsu for any length of time then somewhere up in your dusty vault there’s there’s probably some forgotten gold.
Go find that gold and figure out if it can still work for you on the mats!
This Rant is also in Podcast Form!
As you may or may not know, I run a podcast called The Strenuous Life Podcast which has a heavy focus on jiu-jitsu.
In this podcast I have episodes that are both shorter rants and stories, as well as longer form conversational episodes with UFC fighters, extreme climbers, jiu-jitsu trainers, wrestlers, etc.
Today’s topic was covered in episode 175.
Here are the links to find my podcast on various players
- Apple Podcasts (the purple app on your iPhone)
- Google Podcasts (the new google podcast app)
- Spotify (it’s free)
- Stitcher,
- Soundcloud,
- Google Play
Or you can stream the audio on this page here:
Cheers,
Stephan