Omoplata from Closed Guard

on February 04, 2012

I pulled two of these for the first time today during rolling, but felt like it was a smaller deal than it was made out to be. I’m coming up on 2.5 weeks of BJJ now from having absolutely zero experience in any kind of grappling, and am happy to say that rolling with other white belts feels much slower now. I think it’s a sign that my brain is getting more used to computing positions for eight limbs and two heads, in addition to the position of the cores from which they sprout.

I noticed that a lot of white belts in the class act like submission artists—and that I had the tendency too the first few times—but I think I’ve reached what is my first zen moment of what are probably thousands to come. I realized recently that I’d much rather be a submitted artist instead. For example, while many of the students try to escape near-locked-in armbars and chokes, I basically tap the moment I feel my opponent having gotten the position with a respectable amount of control. I don’t even bother with trying to get out because I feel that the better escape was to not get into that position in the first place. I am tapping not to the submission itself, but to the sequence of mistakes on my part that got me there.

I’ve also stopped going for submissions at random times. During my practice, I focus much more on getting and transitioning positions instead. With other white belts, I’ll even give up a good position just to see if I can get back to it. To my surprise, however, doing this has frequently exposed glaring mistakes on my opponent’s part. In those cases, the submission simply presents itself. Of course, half the time, I’m the one making the mistake and end up in tap city pretty fast. But the end-result is basically the same: about 50/50. Yet with my new strategy, I expend a lot less energy, so I must be on the right track.

Indeed, something Rodrigo Cabral said today really confirmed this intuition: “Don’t go for the submission unless you have the position and the control.” So really, the key for the fledgling white-belt does not lie in learning more techniques, but rather in becoming competent in the basic positions and the hundreds of ways to transition between them.

So while omoplata from closed guard is pretty cool, surreptitiously giving a 5’2″/100lb girl the mount and trying to escape afterwards is even cooler. Especially when she ends up tapping you with a sweet choke.