BJJ Mat Rat - Page 3 of 11

Gordon Ryan Guard Pass Study

I’ve been on a Gordon Ryan kick lately. Specifically his guard passing. I’m trying to get my guard passing sharpened up (sometimes it feels non-existent), so I’ve been studying a lot of guard passing on YouTube. I found this great list of videos analyzing Gordon Ryan’s guard passing.

What’s particularly interesting to me is that to pass in the style of Gordon Ryan, you put your hands on the mat, distributing your weight to your hands while your legs and hips float freely, allowing you to pummel your legs around your opponents.

I’ve always that you should stay heavy on your opponents legs when passing, but this style of passing is opposite of that. I guess in practice the style of passing will change depending on how you want to pass, and what your opponent throws at you. It’s nice to have options.

Click here if you want to goto the full list of videos for the Gordon Ryan Guard Pass Study.

BJJ Heroes has a great analysis of Gordon Ryan’s grappling style. This is a good read: Analyzing Greatness: The Versatile Game Of Gordon Ryan

BJJ Match Study: Marcelo Garcia vs Xande Ribeiro

I’m a huge fan of breakdown videos. I really appreciate it when someone is able to watch a jiu jitsu match, see the details of what is going on, and actually takes the time to make a video explaining it all and sharing it. One of my favorite YouTube channels for this is DPS Breakdowns, but I just stumbled across this video from Ayrshire Grappler and I’m really enjoying it.

The video below goes into great detail explaining this match between two jiu jitsu legends, Marcelo Garcia and Xande Ribeiro. I’m still in the stage of learning where I feel like I’m only catching a small fraction of what actually goes in a high level black belt match. These match studies are extremely helpful to me when doing analysis of competition footage.

Perusing their channel it looks like there are a ton of great breakdown videos to watch. Really great work here. Looks like it’s time to binge watch some jiu jitsu….

The Top Funniest Jiu Jitsu Sites

If you’ve been in jiu jitsu for any length of time whatsoever, you’ve probably seen your fair share of funny jiu jitsu sites. The colossal amount of jiu jitsu memes proves that the jiu jitsu community as a whole likes to have fun. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen any, here are a few of my favorites:

There are no shortage of Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Instagram personalities creating and sharing memes.

But there are also plenty of funny jiu jitsu YouTube channels, and social media pages that create quality, funny videos.

Here are some of the funniest:

Continue reading “The Top Funniest Jiu Jitsu Sites”

Bernardo Faria: Pressure Passing

This video showed up on my YouTube timeline today, it’s Bernardo Faria talking about pressure passing. Some good stuff in this video. He demonstrates how to angle your body so that more of your weight is on your opponents body. For example, using your shoulder to pin your opponent to the ground when passing can be more effective if you angle your body in such a way that more of the weight is going into that shoulder.

This can be generalized to say that when attempting a pressure pass, if you can focus your weight into a small point on your body and apply that point to your opponent then you will generate more pressure. Pedro Vianna talks about applying pressure in this manner to large muscles. He says that if you can focus pressure in the middle of a large muscle then that becomes like a pressure point, making things very uncomfortable for your opponent.

Check out the video to hear Fari discuss pressure passing. It’s a short video, but has some great info.

Striking vs Grappling for Self Defense

Chewy from Chewjitsu recently published a video titled “Friend Said BJJ Is Useless for a Street Fight (Boxing is Realistic)”, and that got me thinking about writing this blog post comparing striking vs grappling.

Prior to starting jiu jitsu, I studied several martial arts. I got involved in a few TMA’s (traditional martial arts) that I won’t name here. Those styles essentially amounted to nothing more than choreographed movements that had zero effectiveness (we’ve all been there right?). I took some boxing, I wrestled a little in high school, and did some MMA training.

I also had some street fights (nothing too serious thankfully), as well as some friendly fights with my buddies just to have fun and goof around.

I feel pretty confident in saying that if you’ve never been punched in the face before, it is a shocking experience. If you are training any type of martial art, but have never really been punched by someone trying to take your head off, then you’d be pretty surprised at how it feels.

Continue reading “Striking vs Grappling for Self Defense”

Kama Jiu Jitsu Vlog

I’ve been spending some time watching videos on the Kama Jiu Jitsu YouTube channel. This channel is run and maintained by Professor Ryan Young. Young is a 2nd degree black belt under Dave Kama (who is one of the original “Dirty Dozen” black belts). He has also trained under Relson Gracie, Rickson Gracie, and many other prominent black belts. He was active in the competition scene for many years but now focuses on teaching.

The videos on the Kama Jiu Jitsu YouTube channel focus on old-school, self-defense based jiu jitsu. Many of the videos reference Rickson Gracie’s style of teaching and try to convey that to the viewer. Topics covered vary from technique, to fitness and diet, to self-defense philosophy.

I really enjoy this channel. Young seems to be a natural vlogger, and has lots of great insights to offer. Check out the video below on how to get better faster in jiu jitsu to see what I mean.

Hard 2 Hurt

Hard 2 Hurt is Icy Mike’s YouTube channel. But just who is Icy Mike, and what is his channel about?

Icy Mike is an ex-police officer turned martial arts instructor/enthusiast/fighter. He has been in several fights in episodes of StreetBeefs and his YouTube channel is focused on exploring the effectiveness of martial arts training in self-defense scenarios (aka: “THE STREETZ”).

This post is a bit of a departure from the regular jiu jitsu topics that I write about, but I think it’s valuable to keep in mind real-world self-defense scenarios during training so that you have an awareness of what works and what doesn’t.

Continue reading “Hard 2 Hurt”

Judo Grip Fighting

A buddy of mine that I train with is a black belt in judo, and he was coaching me on some grip fighting fundamentals that he learned. He was showing me how it’s better to have a higher, inside grip on the lapels, and various ways of fighting to get two on one control. During rolling he got his grips and hit me with a cool sweep, the “Double Tap Foot Sweep” (found an instructional video by Jack Hatton posted below).

Through talking with him I realized that grip fighting is much more complex and cool than I was aware. It’s like a mini-chess game in the bigger game of grappling. Usually when I think of Judo techniques I’m thinking of the endgame, the throws, but now I see that there is an important game in fighting the grips.

Continue reading “Judo Grip Fighting”

Chris Haueter BJJ Seminar (Full Video)

Chris Haueter is one of my favorite guys to take a seminar with. I didn’t attend this seminar but a buddy of mine sent me this link. Great video, lots of good details. The over-arching theme here is “head control”. Control your opponent’s head and you can control their body more easily. He talks about this in the context of setting up chokes from the closed guard quite a bit in this video.

How To Do The Perfect BJJ Mount Escape by John Danaher

In this video John Danaher teaches how to do the perfect mount escape. Danaher is big on the concept of “wedges” for control, and getting inside these “wedges” for defense and escape. He makes use of a power shrimp initially (not to be confused with a sliding shrimp, as he explains) to get a knee between himself and one of Bernardo Faria’s wedges (his leg). Special attention is paid to how the lead knee is inverted towards the ground in order to gain clearance past Faria’s leg.

Nice details here not only on the mount escape, but on different ways of shrimping, and what their uses are.