Saulo Ribeiro Jiu Jitsu Revolution 2
I’ll be taking more notes about the sample clips over the next few days. But I want to point to one thing in particular that I saw that might be helpful immediately. It is Saulo’s X Pass and “combat base” for open guard.
The most important takeaway for now is the standing “combat base.” I had started to pick up the idea of a combat base before the July tournament, when I was trying to uncover ways to pass the guard in no gi competition. By the way, here’s a digression about my no gi guard passing that I’ve been screwing up. When you put pressure on the biceps and stand up in the standard no gi guard pass, you don’t want to try and continue to hold down the guy’s biceps as you sit down into the combat base. There’s no way your arms will be long enough. Whenever I’ve tried to pass the guard this way, I’ve always gotten stuck with my knee somewhere buried in the guy’s back, near the base of his spine if I’m lucky, but nowhere near where it needs to be in order to drop into the combat base. This has been because I was trying to keep the arms pinned at the biceps the WHOLE DAMN TIME. Wrong.
You just need to pin the arms at the biceps for as long as it takes for you to get to standing and to get your knee in place. Once you’re in position, bring your arms back to the guy’s mid-torso and work to control from there. Sure, you won’t have the same level of control, but by that time you’ll also be very close to getting into your combat base. Once you are there—or even close—there won’t be much his arms alone will be able to do to disrupt you. He’ll have to start moving his legs and body—which is precisely what will give you the opportunity to pass.
Anyway, that’s just something I figured out over the weekend.
Back to the Saulo X Pass. What I wanted to note more than anything was the positioning that Saulo used to deal with the open guard. It is fairly clear in the picture I posted from the sample clip. But let’s break it down.
First, you want to have a grip on the collar on one side and the knee on that same side pressing under the guy’s leg, pushing it back towards him somewhat. You don’t want to stand face up, perpendicular to the guy. Let the collar and forward knee side be a bit forward, with your other leg a bit back.
What’s doing with that other leg? The likelihood is that the guy will have his foot in your hip on the other side. That’s okay because that leg is farther back, meaning that he will have to extend to reach your hip, minimizing the power of his foot-in-hip leg (at best, it is a post, now, rather than a piston because it is almost completely extended). What you want to do is to grab the outside of the pants on that extended leg. Grab it at about mid-calf or maybe slightly higher.
To do the actual guard pass, you want to push down with the collar-side knee to create a reaction. As the guy pushes back with his leg, you want to swing your leg straight back out of the way. Then push the foot-in-hip leg over to the inside and swing your leg back so that his legs are both on the outside of your inside leg. As you swing that leg back forward, drop your knee just above his hips to trap the leg. You don’t want the knee to go across his body—more like alongside his body (reminiscent of the “knee pass” that Rodrigo used to drill us on). Remember to keep your grips all the way through—the one grip on the collar, the other grip on the foot-in-hip pants leg between the knee and ankle.
If you do it properly, you should have your arms crossed in an X. You are then ready to drop into side control, or even take it all the way around into an armbar on the far side (something I need to work on religiously between now and then next tournament).
