Marcelo Garcia is known for many things technically-speaking: arm drags, X-guards, mata leao (leaoes?). But next to his omoplata game, Marcelo's guillotine is truly underrated.
I'll do a full write-up of my notes later. For now, I want to say that if I take nothing else away from today's seminar, it would be his details on the guillotine. Like I said in the last post, the guillotine is probably the most important choke for every jiu jitsu fighter to know. And since chokes are by far the most efficient submissions, that makes guillotines the most important submission, as well.
Fortunately, as Marcelo pointed out, guillotine chokes are very straight-forward and very easy to get from a variety of positions. There are a couple of key details that I think make Marcelo's guillotines so effective and worth copying.
First is the hand motion. You want to bring you choking forearm straight up, solar plexus to chin, almost as if you were parrying some spear thrust with a shield. Marcelo made a pont of saying that he never came in from the side, which is how the vast majority of people attack with guillotines.
With your trapping/pinning hand, bring it straightt down behind the head in a chopping motion. You are feeding his neck - by way of his head - into your choking wrist.
The second point is almost the most important. Here you want to pull his head low enough so that you can bend forward and trap his head down with your chest. I've never heard anybody else emphasize this point and it's a huge one. It goes right to the most basic jiu jitsu notion of using as much of your body as possible to attack a specific part of your opponent's body.
Once you bend forward and trap his head, you can release your hand from the back of his head and secure the guillotine grip. You are choking with the blade of your wrist so you want to cup that part of your wrist (on the underside) to close the grip.
It's always funny to hear Joe Rogan or Frank Mir talk about mixed martial artists losing arm strength when trying to attack with guillotines. If you do the guillotine the way Marcelo does, then that doesn't really happen. You might not get the guillotine using his approach in some circumstances. But I'd argue it's got a comparable attack opportunity rate to the average guillotine attack, a much higher success rate and far more efficiency. In other words, no arm burn if done Marcelo's way.
Of course, the other big problem are the MMA gloves, the biggest anti-jiu jitsu disadvantage since the three, five-minute round contest.
To finish, squeeze your elbows into your sides as you lean forward and pull your grip in towards your solar plexus. Go slow. Done right, it really doesn't take much of a squeeze, at all.
When you throw in some of the things that Cindy showed us recently about the guillotine: the guillotine sweep and the guillotine-to-arm stuff-triangle, the guillotine really becomes a must have submission, arguably more than any other.
