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Improving your ground game – “The Squeeze”Filed Under: Instruction

When you’re fighting standing up, everybody has a punchers chance – the opportunity to land a lucky shot and end the match. When you’re on the ground, the luck factor is greatly diminished and the battle of power, control and technique commences. You can dramatically improve your ability to control the ground game by developing “the squeeze”.

Here’s a video of Eddie Bravo – pioneer of the rubber guard – explaining a bit about the power of the squeeze, in the context of choking someone out.
Having a great squeeze is more than just the rear naked choke though- its vital in all your chokes and especially your guard game. In MMA, a guy can stack you in the guard, pass, or start a session of “ground and pound”. When you have the guard and a solid squeeze, it is more likely that you can control the action and work your gameplan. (This is doubly true if you practice rubber guard – a lot of guys starting out will have opponents pass their guard as they work to get or maintain the “mission control” position – practice squeezing your knees together tightly when your opponents in your rubber guard).

Strengthening your squeeze

In the video, you see one way to increase your rear naked choke squeeze by sitting flat on the floor, hugging one knee up to your chest and wrap the same side arm around the leg and squeeze down with the RNC. That’s the basic process to strengthening any of the squeeze-worthy chokes or positions. You sink in deep into the position, getting all the finer technical points set, and slowly start amping up the squeeze intensity until you’re squeezing as hard as you can go. Your whole body should be tight – you want to recruit as many muscle groups to the party as possible. Your abs, neck, biceps, hip adductor – all of these should be working in concert to add to the squeeze. However, you want to continue to breathe throughout the squeeze.

Other great positions that are improved by a good squeeze are the body triangles, triangle choke from guard, standing clinch, bear hug and armbar. You can seriously hurt a training partner, so make sure you practice on medicine balls, grappling dummies or punching bags/sand bags.

For more information on isometric exercises, see here.

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Tags: grappling