Freeing your legs in BJJ
Freeing your legs in BJJ
Freeing your legs in BJJ is a must have skill in BJJ. Learning to extract your leg from the grip of your opponents legs is among the most valuable skills in all of Jiu-Jitsu: A fundamental feature of Jiu-Jitsu as a sport is that positional dominance is largely understood in terms freeing yourself from the grip of your opponents legs. As long as an opponent controls you to some degree through the use of his legs, you are not considered to be in a dominant position. As you get better at BJJ, you will find more and more you can get closer to passing an opponents legs, only to have your opponent snatch one of your legs in a last ditch attempt to prevent you scoring. A second situation is that you actually do pass your opponents guard, but he manages a partial escape by grabbing one of your legs with his and thus breaking your pinning position. As your opponents get better, a third scenario you will often encounter is that if BJJ practitioners who favor half guard bottom as an attacking position and who actively look to ensnare on of your legs so that they can enter their favorite attacks from there. These three common situations will all require you to be able to extract your leg from your opponents grasp and get to a dominant pinning position. So, it is one of the most commonly occurring scenarios in the entire sport and one that you have to be very good at managing. It tends to be a rather slow moving situation due to the close body contact. As such, it is a scenario that older and less athletic athletes can excel in and defeat younger and faster opponents if they know what they’re doing. Learning to get a controlling upper body grip and marrying that to a stable posture are the first steps in a good extraction that can get you the dominant positions you seek at relatively little cost in physical output and tactical risk. It will be among the first skills you will need to become a master half guard passer and solid at pinning your opponents shoulder for control..
