Monday I spent a terrible time rear mounted by Joe, the white belt wrestler. A part of what made it terrible was the fact that he was cranking my jaw instead of working for the RNC. Mamazinho kept yelling at me to do this or that, but I was afraid that if I moved my one hand, Joe was going to dislocate my jaw.
Of course, I could have just tapped and been done with it …
But the real trick is to get the hell out of there. So tonight, my goal is to let every white belt I spar with take my back, and then force myself to escape, reverse to the top and submit with one of my top games. I’m not going to play this with any of the higher belts I roll with. But there aren’t too many white belts that’ve been around longer than me, so I figure I should be able to escape their rear mounts—or tap trying, right?
I re-watched the Saulo clip to pick up some key details of the duck/shuck/swing escape. Here are some key things that I have been forgetting/leaving out.
Protect your neck. Tuck your elbows tight against your sides. Tuck one hand in your collar to defend the one side, and use the other hand to fend off any attempts to reach around.
DUCK! You need to get your ass on the mat. Duck down as deep as you can get so that your weight is not on him where the guy can control your body more easily.
SHUCK! Here’s one thing I’ve been doing wrong about the shuck. Saulo says NEVER use your hands to try and remove a hook. A lot of popular rear mount escapes have you do that. But Saulo’s point makes sense. Not only does it expose your body when you reach for the hook, but also it’s a mismatch: your arm against his leg. Maybe you win, but you don’t win easy. So instead you just kick out the leg. Now, in order for this to work there are two things you’ve GOT to do. First, you must have ducked deep. Second, you must have your elbows in tight. Three, as you kick the leg to remove the hook, you want to push off with the elbow on the same side. By kicking your leg you straighten both your leg and his leg that was bent over yours. By pushing with the elbow, you move that straighten leg off to the side.
SWING! It helps to figure out which direction you’re going to swing before you begin the escape—though I imagine that when you get good, you can figure that out from whichever leg you manage to unhook. Generally speaking, if he’s got grips around your head or neck, then you want to swing in the direction of the fingers. If he doesn’t have that grip, then it doesn’t matter so much. The key detail here is to drop the elbow to the mat on the same side that you are swinging toward. It is basically—surprise, surprise—an elbow escape to knees. Attack the leg that is between yours by either moving into the guy’s half guard or by pinning and passing.
That’s really all there is to it. I need to remember that, occasional lapses of cardio notwithstanding, the solution to my problems is always a technical solution. It is never a matter of being too small or too slow or too weak. It is because I’m not doing the right technical thing. Go to a safe position, regain your focus, and then go for the escape.
