First of all, we’d like to congratulate all of our newly-belted teammates from Elite MMA on their recent promotions this past weekend. We’d like to especially highlight our EIGHT new BJJ Black Belts who were promoted for achieving a goal most can only dream of.
New Elite MMA Black Belts promoted by Eric Williams - JP Shankle, Jordan Rivas, Frost Murphy, Renan Chavez, Joe Soliz, Steven Hansen, Spencer Scrivner, and Forrest Flanary.
The Hip Escape
Last night, our head instructor Eric Williams went over the finer points of the most basic element of escaping from the bottom, the hip esape. This movement is crucial for your sport game because it allows you to recover guard and get back on the road to a sweep or submission. Likewise, it is crucial for self-defense because, when done right, you have a fighting chance at minimizing damage while escaping.
So what are the details of the hip escape from the bottom of mount?
First of all, when your opponent is mounting you, they are looking to achieve the obvious, control your position from the top and lead to a submission. They would likely achieve that by isolating your arms or controlling your neck. Yet before they can do that, they have to make sure to control your spine and stabalize their positon. So before we begin our escape, let’s go over the individual principles of body positioning when on the bottom of mount.
- Hips/Spine – Your opponent is dominant when your back, hips, and shoulders are flat is to the ground. Your goal should be to keep that from happening. The rule of though is to never let someone mount you without having one side of your hip on the ground in preparation for escape.
- Arms – The rule of thumb with your arms in BJJ involves several different things: 1) Keep your elbows in to your ribs to avoid your arms from being exposed for armbars. 2) Do not let your arms go past your center-line. This is not only to avoid the inevitable armbar but also to prevent your opponenent from attacking your back. 3) In escapes, your arms should be used as a wedge. It is important to note that you should use the shortest wedge possible possible without overextending your
arms. So start with your forearms if need be and work from there to free up space. - Legs – As with placing your back on the ground. placing your legs with both feet on the mat and your knees in the air is not the right thing to do. At first, you may feel as if you have more power to buck someone off that way. At best, what this does is at best is allow your opponent to track your movements and ride up in the mount as they work to pin your spine to the ground. At it’s worst, this allows your opponent to grapevine your legs or cross their feet underneath your hips to stifle your movement as they work a choke. As with your hips, the correct thing to do with your llegs is to always keep one leg flat to the ground, giving your opponent no room to stabilize the position by putting their leg in.
- Head/Shoulders – How you protect your neck is directly tied to what you do with your arms. Remember that proper arm positioning is all about keeping your elbows to your ribs and protecting your neck with your hands and forearms. And much like your hips, both your shoulders should never be flat to the ground. Proper positioning involves using your shoulder and abs to help your arms develop wedges. More on that in a minute…
The Hip Escape – Step by Step
Now that we’ve discussed the basic elements of body positioning, let’s see how they all work in concert when performing the hip escape.
- As you fight to keep from being mounted, make sure to pick a side and quickly establish to keep your back, hips, and shoulders on one side off the ground to keep your opponent from stabalizing the position. Make sure your arm are in and your elbows are glued to your ribs. Use your arm that is lower to the ground to establish a wedge between your hip and your opponent’s body. If getting the wedge is difficult, drive down through the tender inner part of the thigh and drive through to establish the wedge. While this is going on, your other arm (or mostly likely forearm at this point) should be blocking your opponents other hip to keep them from taking your back.
- If everything was done right in Step 1, your opponent should not be in a stable mounted position. Rather, you should have created sufficient room with your body positioning and wedge to begin the hip escape. Now one thing I want to focus on is the speed of which the hip escape takes place. If you are explosive and/or your opponent is inexperienced, you may get away with performing the escape in one burst. But more often than not, your opponent is fighting your every movement so it will not be that easy to create space. However, with your arms wedged in the right place, your nearside leg flat on the ground, and your back/shoulders off the mat, you’ll have the time needed to escape methodically.
- Remember the wedges you created with your arms? That will keep your opponent from advancing forward. What you need to do is use your nearside arm along with bringing your head closer to the leg (think crunches) to bring your knee to your elbow and back in. If you do not have the space to accomplish that just yet, continue the move by using your bent foot to push off the ground and escape your butt/hips outwards. Like I said, the movement needed to create the space necessary to bring your knee in and recover guard does not come from one burst of movement. Neither does it come from dissengaging and escaping the entirety of your body. You may gain the space necessary with one movement or a series of six small movements. But if you do this methodically, you’re going to get your space. One you do, bring your bottom knee in first, then your other one. This is important as only by bring the bottom leg in do you allow yourself the proper technique to recover guard. Bringing the top leg in may be sufficient but experienced players will just dissengage, drive your top leg down, and pass that way, wasting all the energy and technique you spent in maintaining your wedges and bringing that first knee in. So remember. knee-to-elbow and bring that same knee in before the other one.
So now guys, pop quiz, what details did you notice were missing, if any?
