Adults: Guard Recovery

When we’re in an open guard position, we never want to extend. When we extend, we isolate our own limbs making it easier for the passer to pass. Remember, the passer wants to get to and control the space between the shoulders and hips.

If we extend, then we also can’t make our own connections. Remember, grips are gateways to action. You need grips in order to effectively off-balance and formulate attacks.

So, if you’re on your back, without a connection, you want to pull your knees to your chest so you can effectively create connections. This brings your hands in range to fight off any grips your opponent may get.

For our connections, we want our feet either posting or pulling and we need a grip.

If you notice, for our connections, we want our feet either pushing or pulling. If they’re unable to do so, we need to be able to recover our feet. That’s part of retention.

To do so, we need to try to keep our shoulders and hips square to the passer. You can do this multiple ways, but two ways I usually use are a) framing on the shoulders or b) a combination of framing on the shoulders and self-framing.

Once we have these frames, and we’re square, we can use them to make space. We can look to high-leg, or low leg. With a high-leg, we’d going to stay square, and swing our top leg up and over, trying to pull to the inside. With a low leg, we’re going to square up and bring our inside leg to the outside hip.

Finally, if we fail at these items, we can look for off-balances to create space and recover.

These usually come in the form of either bumping with our knee or grabbing collar ties on the head.

Once we off-balance and make space, now is our time to take all of the other pieces we’ve been working and use them.