Concepts

The Ladder Concept

Have you ever rolled with someone who seems to have a tractor-beam-like attachment to you? No matter what you do, you can’t keep their weight off you, and it feels like you’re slowly drowning in concrete.

Braulio basically does this to me every time we roll, and I can assure you it’s a terrible feeling. By feeling it so many times (and asking him), the concept behind how to become a human tractor beam is pretty simple and can be used by anyone.

I call it the Ladder concept and want to share it with you now.

A lot of people think about passing (or any technique) as a single technique, but it’s not. A better way to think about passing is that you have to win a series of small battles.

Each battle is a rung on the ladder that finally gets you to your goal.

If your opponent prevents you from climbing to the next rung of the ladder, you stay there until you break through their defences. And if they break from one of your attacks, you only want to fall one rung of the ladder rather than to the bottom.

To illustrate the ladder concept, I want to share a short clip from the Cradle Masterclass where I talked about this concept. Check out the video below to watch it now:

If you want to improve your passing and learn a simple by highly effective guard passing system, click the button below and check out the No Gi Cradle Masterclass:

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Visualisation For BJJ

You’ll often hear BJJ players talk about Jiu Jitsu being 80% mental yet no one really talks about how you train the mental side of the game. One of the ways we can train the mental side of BJJ is through visualisation.

Visualisation has been shown to be a highly effective way to reduce competition anxiety, develop skills, and improve performance. But what is visualisation and how do you use it to your advantage?

In this video, Tom shares his experience using visualisation and how he uses visualisation pre-competition and in-competition.

This article has most of the references for the studies into visualisation if you’d like to do further research:

http://nancynewell.com/blog/2018/1/21/the-hidden-power-of-visualization

Lessons Learned In Revenge

When I first started, Jiu Jitsu professional BJJ competitions were a dream. Honestly, I never expected them to become a reality, let alone be invited to fight in them.

So, when I was approached by the guys at the Tuff Invitational I jumped at the chance to compete in a professional Sub-Only competition. Plus I would get to settle a score with an old rival, Paul Bridges, after nearly nine years.

The Arm Bar

Paul is one of the pioneers of UK BJJ, and I had the pleasure (or misfortune) to fight him under MMA rules back in 2006 on a UKMMA show.

This was really the early days of the UK MMA scene, and the competitors were nowhere nearly as well rounded as they are today.

Side note: Paul and I’s fight took place in one of the first cages in the UK. If you watch the video closely you’ll see there is a 3-inch gap between the cage and canvas, and the canvas was actually canvas, it hurt like hell when you grappled on it and left you with severe friction burns. Fun times.

At the time, I was primarily a Kickboxer, although I had done a fair amount of grappling and wasn’t afraid of the ground or to wrestle.

Paul, on the other hand, was already a purple belt and one of the top guys on the UK BJJ scene having won most of the comps available at that time.

It was a classic striker vs. grappler match up, that unfortunately for me, went the same painful way striker vs. grappler matchups go.

Check out the fight below:

This fight and Paul’s beautiful armbar are the main reason’s I got so heavily involved in Jiu Jitsu. I realised if I wanted a future in MMA I’d need to develop my BJJ skills to avoid situations like this happening again.

However, along the way I developed a love for Jiu Jitsu that overtook my desire to compete in MMA and be punched int the face. The rest, as they say, is history.

Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to compete against Paul again. He was always ahead of me in belt rank, and by the time I’d caught up he was focusing on his academy.

I thought I’d never get to test myself against him again.

So, when the guys at the Tuff Invitational asked me who I’d like to fight, Paul was the first person I thought of, and thankfully he agreed.

The Rematch

My preparation for the match against Paul was a little strange. I’d just competed and won the No Gi Worlds for the second time and was in good shape. But I had a distinct lack of high-level training partners and it was still a 6-weeks out from the event so needed to stay in shape.

So, I did what I could and I found a few great people to train with around Devon (which meant a lot of travelling but hey-ho). And when I couldn’t roll, I supplemented with more strength and conditioning sessions.

By the time the fight came around, I was in the best shape I could be in and I had a solid game plan.

That’s an important lesson, many people miss. When you’ve done everything you can in preparation for a fight, you will feel more confident. This is why training camps are essential for creating many people’s positive mindsets.

So, how did the fight go? Well here’s a complete breakdown of the match

The Lessons

Personally, there’s tonne of things I took away from this event, including: not rolling for 40-minutes before a match, fighting on a platform feels like a deathmatch, and several other things.

And there are also a couple of important lessons you can take away from this it too. Here’s four of the most important:

1) Don’t keep driving forwards if you head gets caught during a takedown attempt. Instead, shuck your head out by turning towards your head towards the body. Here’s Braulio Estima demonstrating the technique:

2) Don’t wait when you’re passing guard. Instead, immediately go on the offensive and start to pass. This forces your opponent to defend your pass not whatever you did to get there.

3) Put yourself in a position where your opponent is forced to defend multiple things. Your opponent can only really defend one thing at a time, so if you have two attacking options, they will have to give you one.

This is the reason I was able to submit Paul. I forced him to defend the armbar, Sucuri, and his neck.

You may never have seen this submission before, it’s a little unusual but the Sucuri is incredibly painful. You can learn The Sucuri HERE.

4. Do your best to prepare for a match. Even if you don’t have a lot of time, or training partners, or whatever, the knowledge you’ve done everything you can to prepare for an event is incredibly beneficial to your mindset when competing.

If you enjoyed this article, please leave me a comment or share it with your friends. It would make my day.

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The most powerful submission in the world!

In my humble opinion, there is one submission position above all others that is the most powerful. I know that’s a bold statement, but it’s true.

When you slap this position on your opponent, you have a plethora of submission options to choose from, but it’s insanely difficult to escape. Even better, this submission position works just as well in the Gi, No Gi, or MMA!

So what’s this wonderful position I’m talking about? Check out the video below to learn it now…

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The Submission Transition Game

One of the first instructionals I got was Erik Paulson’s Game Development. This short instructional covers 8 ways of training to develop your grappling.

One of those ‘games’ was attacking by transitioning from submission to submission. The idea being if you master this you’ll create an inescapable web of destruction for your opponent.

Throughout my Jiu Jitsu career, I’ve regularly practiced this game (and the other 7) when sparring, and it’s greatly helped my understanding of submission and how to connect them.

Along with improving my understanding of submissions, there is another benefit to developing this skill.

If your opponent refuses to tap you can transition to another submission without causing injury.

This is incredibly important in training, as you get to develop your technique safely even if your opponent is being an idiot or doesn’t realise the danger. To give you an example of how this looks, check out this short video.

In the video, you’ll see I catch my opponent in a triangle, he defends and I transition to an arm bar.

That arm bar is on, but as my opponent doesn’t tap, which leaves me with two options: push harder and risk injury or transition to a tighter submission.

I chose option two and switch to a K-Arm Bar. At that moment my opponent knows there is no escape and taps.

This is a great example of training smart and training safely. Give this training method a try next time your sparring and let me know how you get on.

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