Adults: Ghost Escape from Side Control

There are two main areas of control for side control. Either the person on top is pinning your shoulders, or they’re pinning your hips. Either way, there’s one specific frame we absolutely must have. What is that frame? It’s the same side forearm frame in the hip. Why is that important? It stops progression into north/south, and mount. Our opponent now has to deal with the frame before moving forward.

To get our frame in, we need to discern whether our opponent is pinning our shoulders or our hips. If they are pinning our hips, we can simply get our frame in by moving our head away from our opponent’s hips. If our opponent is pinning our shoulders, we use our lower body to bridge and create space, so we can drop in our forearm frame.

Okay, so now we have the frame in. The golden standard of side control escapes is the knee elbow. It’s a strong position that lands us in follow-up sweeps and attacks. However, it only works well if they are pinning our shoulders, because we can shrimp our hips away and insert our knee to create space. If they are pinning our hips, by pinching their knee/elbow together, we can’t walk our hips away to create space and get our knee in.

Just like getting our arm in, we’re going to use the part of our body that’s not being controlled to escape. Our frame on the hip is going to swim underneath to the far hip. That must be done first, to ensure he cannot move into the mount and attack our far arm. Our far arm, ideally, needs to get in front of his face. However, it can be on the far side of his head. The main objective of this arm is to keep his head near our hip, instead of it being based out above our shoulder.

To escape, we pinch our knees close to the hip, then swing them out. At the tail of our swing, we bridge into our opponent to remove our head and slide out of the backdoor.

In order to secure the position, we want to keep our chest connected to their tricep, and we need to retract our elbow to get to the front headlock position. We’ll stop here for now.

If we can get our far arm in front of their face, with a goose neck, then we can immediately counterattack off of our escape. That’s the best time to counterattack, because his brain has to catch up and switch from offensive to defensive mode. As we escape, if we have the goose neck in front of their face, then we can d’arce them on the escape.

The same principle of the chest connected to the tricep applies, but we aren’t going to retract our elbow. To get a good clamp on the d’arce, we’re going to have the back of our hand facing the floor, and we’re going to grab our tricep. Then we rotate in to lock in the choke. For the finish, we’re going to squeeze like we squeeze an RNC. Pinching our elbow to our ribs and big chest, pulling our shoulders back like we’re doing a row. While we’re doing this, our hips are walking into their hips.