Just wanted to put the word out – Brandon Ruiz is having a seminar this Saturday at Fusion, 11:00 – 1:30. Fee is only $20. Brandon is an excellent teacher and really knows his stuff. His takedowns are amazing. If you don’t know who Brandon is, check his bio below. I’ve had the opportunity to roll with him a couple of times and I can tell you, he is an animal. After he beat the pulp out of me, he gave me a number of really good pointers to help my game – which I use all the time now.
Brandon is holding the seminar to raise funds to help him go to a FILA grappling world championship. It’s a true world-tournament, and invitation only. If you want some excellent training and help support Brandon, I’ll see you Saturday.
BIO
2008 Pancrase Submission Wrestling World Champion
“The King of Combat Grappling” & Outstanding Wrestler Award
2008 FILA Grappling World Silver Medalist
2008 IBJJF Brazilian Jiu Jitsu World Championships Bronze Medalist
2004 Greco Roman Pan Am Championships Silver Medalist
3 x Pancrase Submission Wrestling National Champion
4 x Brazilian Jiu Jitsu/Grappling State Champion
8 x Greco Roman & Freestyle All-American
Judo State Champion
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt (Machado)
I have been teaching, training, and playing with the notion of pressures lately. Essentially, this had led me to conclude that achieving, maintaining and reversing positional dominance is the premier skill in MMA. That’s right. Positional dominance is the hierarchical king to all other concepts in MMA. Sure, I could be wrong. But I challenge you to outline a better one (please do! and then teach me). I dare say that positional dominance is at the root of success in MMA, indeed, it should be the prime directive of mixed martial artists.
Think of it this way – positional dominance is the ability to exert maximum pressure with minimal effort while simultaneously optimizing your mobility and decreasing your opponents.
Take side control for example. The top cross-body position is unquestionable dominant. Gravity allows you to crush your opponent pretty hard, especially when you learn the finer points of posturing for top pressure. You can switch position into scarf hold/kesa gatame, mount, north south, knee on belly, or even stand back up. Your elbows and knee strikes have “umph” and you can force openings to proper strike points. The guy on the bottom has weak control over your posture and mobility, and his pressure (hugging pressures, upa escapes, arm/knee frames) pales in comparison to yours. His hips are often blocked by your knee or arm, his shoulders are pinned to the mat – his mobility is severely restricted. The strikes from the guy on the bottom? Laughable.
Now consider the clinch game, two fighters both having an overhook and an underhook. They both exert pressure that controls movement and limits mobility. However, unless a fighter is skilled at the position, neither fighter has a positional advantage. Many times, over/under control becomes a battle of strength and explosiveness.
One last example – striking. Squaring off against your opponent puts you on an equal position. Cutting an angle behind him opens him up: striking his vitals becomes easier and his counter-strikes are hard to pull off. Often, he has to adjust his position before making any kind of offensive effort or block. Anderson Silva is great at controlling angles and space; see his book Striking for MMA, for more on that.
Positionally Dominant Game Planning
The overall frame work of your technical training can be broken up into two parts. Taking a dominant position and exploiting it. The delivery system differs on your body type, style presence, and martial art. The question is no longer “why is mount better than guard?” but rather, “Am I training in a realistic way that will emphasize my ability to gain positional dominance and exploit it along the way?”.
More and more, when I’m training or teaching, I’m trying to think, “How does this move help the application of positional dominance?” In my personal game, I’m trying to avoid just collecting a bunch of moves and instead try to build cohesive skills to gain dominant position.
Jujitsu escapes aren’t about blocking my opponents submissions – they are about advancing my position. The mantra of “Step every time you strike, strike every time you step” is becoming a way to not only increase punching power, but advance my body position by striking.
I think the overall shift in focus from details-orientation to “big picture” thinking will help my game. Its not that details aren’t important – they are. However, I want my game driven by fundamental principles from a top down approach, not a collection of moves from a bottom up approach. (I see the bottom up approach taught quite a bit)
Summary
Get and maintain positional dominance. When you do:
Strikes do more damage. Counter strikes do less.
You have increased control over your opponents movements, strategy and technical options.
You have increased freedom of body movement, more technical options and an more strategy selection.
Your pressure wears down an opponent physically and mentally, without overtaxing your energy.
Submissions become more viable and easier to pull off.
Almost every form of advantage is boosted when in a dominant position.
I was pondering something James Irvin said prior to his fight with Anderson “The Spider” Silva, talking about a wrestling clinch and a Muay Thai clinch:
Against Franklin and Henderson, it’s not that his clinch was so good. The clinch definitely favors the taller, stronger guy with more leverage. But in the Thai clinch, aggressiveness goes a long way. He just seemed so much bigger against Dan and Rich. I’m not taking anything away from him. He really bullied those guys around and was able to just reach out and grab them …There’s a big difference between the wrestling clinch and the Muay Thai clinch, and it looked like Dan and Rich didn’t know how to Muay Thai clinch. I know we didn’t see the best of Rich.
I’ve seen several flavors of clinching, and I usually just lump them into two camps – the Greco Wrestling style clinch and the south-east Asia “plum” clinch. (If someone can definitively say more than Irvin did, please enlighten me!). Since I’ve posted a more Thai-Style clinch article (link above), I wanted to show a couple of videos from more wrestling based fighters showing off striking from the clinch.
Here’s Chuck Liddell’s take on the Thai clinch and he shows off how one might sneak in a few elbows while pummeling for hooks – among other things. It’s pretty cool, and it’s about 3 minutes long.
Something that’s interesting to me is that at about 2:30 in the above vid, Chuck shows how he’d escape the clinch by controlling one arm down and then lifting the other elbow and “throw it by”. The “throw-by”, or to “throw them by” is common wrestling nomenclature; so it’s nice to see Liddell bring his wrestling background into a Muay Thai style move.
Now, for the video below, Tito Ortiz, who also has a crazy-deep wrestling background, shows off some striking from the double under hooks, single under hook. At one brief moment, Tito also shows how to fire off a head butt, assuming you’re in a NHB fight that allows it. He mentions that ” I wanna use the top of the crown of my head, … it’s the strongest part of my body probably.” With the gargantuan dome that Tito sports, no doubt its true. Anyway…
One place where I know you can get GREAT training on striking from the Greco – style clinch is the train to fight and win, with Randy Couture. It’s a cheap download. Randy goes over a lot of stuff – one of my favorites is how he angles off and strikes with a single collar tie. Here’s a clip from Randy’s DVD download, linked above.
BTW, Randy’s Book, Wrestling for fighting, is great BUT if you’re looking for striking mixed with your wrestling, I might look else where. It’s a great book and focuses a lot on the stand up game in terms of locks and take downs (not submissions though).
One last fighter who has a strong background in wrestling is Jens Pulver. He shows off how to use strikes to set up the under hooks, punching a guy up cage, etc. Little Evil calls his instructions dirty boxing, and you can see how his wrestling comes through. Notice how he engages into the clinch, fires off some shots, and then squeezes up into a body lock, maybe to continue with a Heimlich drop takedown.
Don’t you just hate it when you shoot in for a take down and your opponent sprawls nicely, flattening you out on to all fours with him on top of your back? Me too. From this sprawl position, the top grappler has plenty of options – anaconda, guillotine, taking the back, you name it. But what does the bottom grappler have? Not much. I think the best option is to try to escape into a better position. Here’s one idea:
It’s basically the high school wrestling “sit out”, and I think it works pretty well. I’ve been experimenting with a couple of other ideas for this situation, and when I refine them I’ll post. If you have any techniques you like from this position, let us in on them!
The longer a fight lasts, the sweatier the combatants gets. The sweatier the guys get, the harder it is to lock in submissions – especially if your opponent is a hairless manatee, having shaven himself from head to toe. Moves that require gripping or friction lose effectiveness as things get slippery.
At first blush, it’s an odd thing to think about – but it’s important. If you have a jujitsu-heavy MMA style, you have to plan that some submissions just won’t work very well in the 2nd or 3rd rounds. In particular, The armbar and triangle from guard are two that get harder lock in later in fights. You’ll slap them on and squeeze confidently, only to your chagrin when your grease monkey opponent slithers out his head or arm. Conversly, the mata leo/rear naked choke is one that seems to hold up well despite the sweat coverage.
This is good news if you’re a ground and pounder – you can be agressive while in the opponent’s guard with a diminshed fear of submissions when you start to sweat.
The picture above is of two men participating in the Turkish sport of kirkpinar – oil wrestling. In kirkpinar, they rub down each other with olive oil, wear traditional black pants (leather?) and wrestle furiously. I am not making this up.
