Examining Side Control Pressure from Both Players

Side Control top Pressure

  • Goals:
    • Eliminate their ability to obtain/re-obtain effective frames
      • Unholy Trinity
      • Turning their knees away
      • Your low knee tight to their near hip to prevent leg frame recovery
      • Your high knee in armpit to isolate their near arm
        • This is their easiest frame to recover, so it needs attention
    • Sink your body weight into their body to drain their cardio energy while you recover your cardio energy 
    • Transition to Mount, BackControl, or Submission
  • The Unholy Trinity of Top Side
    • The Gold standard of top side control. 
    • More difficult to get to, but its the best to crush them into the floor
    • Consists of:
      • Crossface into their jaw: 
        • Easiest part to achieve, bare minimum for pinning positions
        • GOAL: to break posture by forcing them to look away. 
          • Bench press PRs are not achieved in a posture of looking all the way sideways
      • Underhook: 
        • Not as easy to get, but very much worth it
        • GOAL: create a connection to enhance top pressure that keeps their far shoulder tight to the floor
  • Head/Chest “lower” than the bottom player’s chest: 
    • Most difficult to obtain, but is most dominant.(They’re gonna frame on your throat A LOT)
    • Completely shutdown their defensive arm framing opportunities
    • GOAL: Strongly enhances your ability to prevent their head movement that will be required for them to execute bridging that is capable of generating displacing torque effective enough for them to recover their leg frames.

Side Control escape

  • Goals:
    • Establish as many frames on inside position as possible
    • Push with those frames, generate bridging TORQUE, and move hips away to create space between your chest and their chest
    • Move into that space with even more frames (typically legs)
    • Transition to a closed guard position
      • Don’t get greedy. Don’t try to scramble to top. If you can’t get to closed guard, accept and play from the first guard that you end up in that you can be offensive from
        • This is why you need at least ONE good technique from each position. Eventually when you have more than one technique from each spot, it’s magic for you!
  • Recovering your near side arm frame is the first step
  • Bridging to generate torque
    • GOAL: Get their Head and hips on the SAME side of your heart/bellyButton center line 
    • Angle of your hips when you bridge into them: Walk tight to them so you immediately and totally push into them, not waste energy first closing space to impact them
    • Asymmetrical bridging supports generating torque and the follow-up hip escape
  • Effective Dynamic Framing Kills the Unholy Trinity
    • Crossface into their jaw: 
      • Framing creates separation from their shoulder allowing you to rotate your head which means you can move your head, which is a prerequisite for effective torque bridging
    • Underhook:  
      • Framing keeps your shoulder off the floor, which is a pre-condition for effective torque bridging into someone’s chest
    • Head/Chest “lower” than the bottom player’s chest: 
      • The less pressure you have going into your chest, the more energy you are able to commit into displacing them since you don’t have to expend that energy to just overcome pressure to get yourself off of the floor. 

Exploring Competition Anxiety

  • Anxiety is the feeling that something bad is going to happen in the future. 
  • The goal of doing jiu jitsu is to add benefit to your life. Do not overfocus on one aspect (that manifests and dysfunctional) and let that take away joy from doing jiu jitsu
  • You can change how I feel about this specific event to make it a more enjoyable experience
  • “I’ve done well in tournaments before and thats made me feel good, even the matches I lost. There’s no rational reason that this experience will be different.”
  • What is really in your control:
    • Something you have some degree of control over: How you feel about how you expect yourself to perform .
      • This is something that has value in actively thinking about to some degree, but don’t fall in a trap of negative cyclical thinking( see below). 
  • Something you don’t have any control over: How this specific performance will be used to grade your progress forward.
  • If I can’t do anything about it, don’t waste energy worrying on this. It might be a factor, or it might not.

Cyclical Thinking  

DYSFUNCTIONAL CYCLICAL: “The more I cannot get into a good headspace, the more difficult it will be to relax and do my thing. If I am not relaxed and able to do my thing, I will not be able to get in a good headspace”:

  • THIS IS IRRATIONAL because you are capable of changing you headspace so you do not need to be stuck in a bad headspace that you cannot escape.
  • You are dynamic and are capable of improving how you feel/react about something at any given time. 
  • THIS IS A RATIONAL RESPONSE “Because I can change how I feel, I can get excited to compete,usually this happens when I see my friends and we get warmed up together.”

FUNCTIONAL CYCLICAL: “The more good actions I accomplish (takedowns, passes, sweeps, sub attempts, even minor advantage improvements), the better I feel. The better I feel, the more good things I will be able to accomplish.”

  • THIS IS RATIONAL: When you find something (major or minor) that you did well,  use that momentum to keep doing good things. 
    • “If I do good things, I am likely to feel good about myself.”
    • Outcome of match should not be the entirety to how you feel about yourself and your jiu jitsu experience.
      • Its correlated, but its not everything.
      • “Jiu Jitsu is a part of me, but at the end of the day its still not the entirety of me. “

Reframing priorities and goals of competing

It’s okay to want to be competitive and do well. Don’t get obsessed with doing everything perfect because a lot of stuff during and after the match is outside of your control. 

  • Performance on one day vs. General competency
    • Enjoying jiu jitsu is more than just winning a medal on one specific day. Don’t over emphasize a single performance, good or bad. 
  • It can reveal a lot about your technical game, but should not be an indicator of you enjoying jiu jitsu as an activity you do and a lifestyle you lead. 
  • Part Whole Fallacy impl: Your jiu jitsu is more than just one competitive bracket. Even the best players lose at some point, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t have good jiu jitsu or don’t enjoy rolling and learning. Same for you.

  • Enjoyment vs Recognition
    • Pressure of seeking recognition takes away from the enjoyment of doing the activity. 
    • Reframing your perception to lessen self-imposed pressure will increase your enjoyment.

Use competition as an opportunity to truly see what your jiu jitsu is when its time to go 100%.

Learn what you need to keep sharpening from what went really well.

Even if you lose, find something to feel good about and keep doing that.

Learn what you need to improve on things you were not satisfied enough with.

Learn how to solve the problems you couldn’t solve in your match

Managing Doubt

“Are you finding more reasons to doubt your ability to perform?”

Don’t do that.

Unfavorable actions happen to you because you don’t have a choice. If you could stop or handle it, then it wouldn’t be bad.

If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen bc you can’t stop it anyways, so don’t waste mental energy ruminating on bad stuff.

If/when unfavorable stuff happens, you know what to do as a reaction, so you will react to it at that time, so don’t worry about it now. 

Instead, think of your strengths and good things that you are in control of. You are in control of those so these are the thoughts and plans worth dwelling on and analyzing. 

Think about what will go well: 

Situational awareness abilities

Skills you favor

Sequences you’ve worked on

Sequences that come natural to you

Your ability to calculate risk

Your ability to decide at what level of risk is moving forward acceptable to you  

That time when the progress happens

Perseverance. Belief. Grit.

Endurance events are built on these principals. You will not be able to complete an event without engaging or learning these concepts. The core principal of endurance is to keep going when you feel like giving in. It is undoubtedly fine and noble, but when actually looking at endurance in action, it appears as anything but beautiful.

The real progress from endurance comes from the growth and lessons learned as you reflect and move forward after your trials.

The personal satisfaction of overcoming the resistance to cave in is one of the most fulfilling accomplishments in any of life’s worthwhile tribulations. Focused training, honest reflection, and calculated planning are undoubtedly important in getting you to where you need to be, but you don’t leave it all out there in your preparation. After all, it’s still practice time. Its not yet the main event.

The true growth comes from when you don’t hold back. The true growth comes from when you are in that place where you give it your all and can not honestly justify to yourself not trying harder. This is not a pretty place, but it’s the only place where growth happens.

If you fall short, it’s because things didn’t go your way. These shortcoming can be reflected in immediate moments or they can be drawn out through extensive experiences. “I should not have stepped there”. “I should have fueled better this week”. “I was wrong and shouldn’t have said that”.

Whether these things were expected or not, it doesn’t matter. Simply put, it happened and that’s that. At this stage, you can view your failure to adequately deal with occurrences by making excuses or you can choose to endure and grow from them.

The endurance mindset is not the mindset you exercise when you make excuses. Excuses reject actualized shortcomings. Excuses blame conditions outside of your control.

Endurance accepts failure and promotes growth that seeks to avoid repeating the same failures. Endurance preaches ownership and admitting what you failed to do so in the future you can make better decisions.

Two people can each experience the same event and one of them can make excuses while the other one can choose to endure. This decision is one that only you alone can frame. Always be the one who decides to endure

Endurance must be applied to any struggle in your life. Deal with this now and get through to the other side as a stronger, wiser person. Put the early-morning/late-night work in needed in order to get you cross that finish line. If you’re barely in the fight, but still there, dig deep and don’t tap out until its your only choice. Commit to that routine that sets you up for long-term success.

Endurance is about moving forward in the face of adversity. Endurance is not about never quitting. Sometimes it isn’t giving up. Sometimes it’s about letting go so you aren’t being held back from going to where you want to be. Sometimes you just realize you’re passing another milestone that isn’t yet your final destination.

Making that positive change, pushing through that last set, trying new things until you find your groove, or keeping the pace in the dark are all very much driving you forward.

When you are in the thick of it, moments will be messy. Your face will be marred with mud and sweat. You heart will ache and you mind will panic as it runs in circles. All of this is okay. All of this might very well be part of the process.

Endure.

Keep on keeping on and once that storm passes, you’ll be in a better spot. You went through all of that and you’re still here. You remember that the struggle happened. It may have hurt. Parts may still hurt. You won’t discount that there was pain and doubt, but those negative memories pale in comparison to remembering that you had the perseverance, belief, and grit to keep moving forward when everything was telling you to give up.

It might not be pretty as it’s happening, but driving forward through those heavy moments is what is necessary to truly endure.