In BJJ, Use the power of your hips
In BJJ, Use the power of your hips
In BJJ, Use the power of your hips! Using the power of your hips is important o building a good defensive system. In most respects the human body is not particularly impressive in terms of generating power, but the hips and legs are a notable exception. When you can harness the power of your hips in a constructive way, you’ll find your combat effectiveness greatly increases. One of the best examples of this comes when athletes use their hips effectively against takedown attempts. Aggressively checking and stopping an opponents takedown with your hips and then pulling him onto your hips to lift and rotate him enables you to strongly counter takedowns and many forms of wrestling based guard sweeps. Probably the most commonly used variation of this is uchi mata. You’ll need an upper body connection, usually an over hook, but it’s the lower body that supplies the horsepower. Learning to quickly fit your hips into and under your opponents hips provides you with a tremendous source of power that you can call on at a moment’s notice and turn defense into offense. Here at Savarese BJJ Academy (www.njbjj.com) we teach escaping your hips is the one thing every defensive BJJ movement has in common. From there on, if you take a look at the BJJ bridge, another huge part of using the hips, you’ll notice that the end goal is the same. Escape your hip from underneath your opponent. In fact, you might argue that the bridge is nothing more than a hip escape done with your hips higher off the ground. In short, everything in BJJ is about the hips. Even a bridge. Next time you need to bridge, think about being close to your opponent, using your hamstrings for power, and going in the right direction. Throw in the concept of escaping your hips away when you’re at the peak of the motion and you have a foolproof way of bridging. Now transfer all this knowledge to any other position that requires you to bridge another integral part of using your hips to escape. .
