Below, you will find reflections from the stand-up grappling practice that I led at Fit Factory Jiu Jitsu, 3814 Boyd’s Creek Highway, Sevierville, TN on February 24, 2025.
We’ve been working the front headlock for weeks now and I think I’ve almost narrowed in on my “preferred submissions.”
I want a suite of options that are easy to teach, and yet sufficiently dynamic as to not be predictable. What I’ve come up with is surprisingly rational, maybe even too rational. Whenever something makes too much sense I get suspicious and start looking for the hidden flaw. Time will tell.
I’ve narrowed us down to three submissions, each attacking in a different direction, but each starting from the same basic setup. My hope is that this organization scheme will allow the attacker to have a preferred submission among the three but be able to swap more or less seamlessly between them as the defender puts up a fight.
The initial position
I’ve written at some small length about the front headlock before, but the basic orientation bears repeating:
Both players’ hips are facing towards the mat, with bodies oriented head-to-head
Attacker has top position with chest (or side of ribcage) in contact with the back of the defender’s head
Attacker has a hands-connected grip that encloses the defender’s head and one of their arms
For sake of easy orientation, we refer to one arm as the chinstrap arm, this is the arm inhabiting the space between the defender’s neck and the top of their shoulder
The other arm is the overhooking arm, this is the arm inhabiting the armpit
Attacker’s hands are connected in an s-grip and the palm of the overhooking arm is facing upward, away from the mat
This palm-up orientation of the overhooking arm affords a biomechanically superior ability to draw the elbows together and up. Pulling both of your elbows towards your centerline and up towards your ribs takes away space within the loop of the arms, space the defender might otherwise use to facilitate escape
The submissions
Towards the overhooking side, we have The Wrench
To initiate this choke, we will look to improve our starting grip by punching our chinstrap hand high and through to the outside of the opponent’s armpit, switching to a gable grip (overhooking palm is still facing up), then retracting our grip so the thumb of the chinstrap arm is wedged into the seam of the outside of the armpit
Then we pop up onto our toes and begin to circle our body to the overhooking side of the opponent’s body while jamming our forehead/top of our head into the pocket between the opponent’s thigh and ribs (i.e. their hip crease), forcing their spine to bend into the block against the outside of their shoulder that we’ve created with our body
From here, instead of forcing the alligator roll commonly used from this spot, we squeeze for the finish
Some fine details
The chinstrap arm needs to be in direct contact with one side of the opponent’s neck, any looseness here will limit the strangling potential. This can be the forearm or the bicep depending on limb length. You must develop the sensitivity to ensure you have good contact, ideally this is secure before you initiate the movement described in “point b”
The other side of the strangle occurs by blocking the opponent’s shoulder from moving away from the squeeze by blocking their movement with your body (this is why we jam our head into the pocket), but a strong defender may be able to keep their elbows flared. To mitigate this flare, the attacker must collapse this post elbow. There are at least two ways to do this.
Complete the alligator roll so both players end up on their backs facing up. From here, the attacker can ratchet a deeper control of the post arm since it is no longer locked in place by the load it was bearing. Then we switch our hips explosively and roll back over to complete the choke as written above.
(My preference) Jam into the opponent by lifting up on their chin and driving your hips forward, forcing their weight toward their hips and taking their weight off of their arms. Collapse the flared arm so it cannot be used as a post and then finish the choke as written above.
In the interest of keeping these MATREPs bite sized, I’m not going to dig in on submissions 2 and 3 today. Tune in next week for further breakdown, as well as some ideas for how to put it all together.
Good Hunting,
Charles