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 January 13, 2025.
I’ve been coaching front headlock escapes for a few weeks now.
For a few weeks before that I was coaching entries into the position and maintenance of the position. I haven’t yet instructed front headlock submissions.
This is consistent with my coaching philosophy: teach people how to control a position and how to escape a position before you teach them submissions from the position.
I know this is an uncommon approach, so here’s my justification. If the attacker is attempting to submit a defender who has little to no knowledge of the position, the submission is likely to work even if the attacker doesn’t get the details right. If the defender is familiar with the position, it forces the attacker to get the details right. The attacker won’t get the (false) sense of short term success that they’d get by jumping right into drilling submissions against complicit opponents, but they end up with skills that are more robust after they’re broken-in.
I expect my people to show up to practice with the requisite perseverance to get them through the early failures.
We’ve been working three main front headlock escape routes
Short arm drag attacking the top player’s chin-strap arm
Peek out attacking the top player’s chin-strap arm
False-peek out to the top player’s overhooking arm followed by a deep shot on the nearest leg
Ideally the “elbow strike” of the false peek out will break the grip of the top player allowing the freedom of movement to follow through on the shot, but even if they keep their grip, our bite on their leg turns the battle into a more even one than it was before.
The process of finishing this shot looks like what John Smith is coaching in this video except we still have to mind the strangle threats (even once we are on top if the opponent tenaciously maintained their grip). Perhaps uncoincidentally, the posture he is cueing will help keep us safe. A well-aligned neck is a strong neck, and a strong neck is a safe neck.
This week, we dug in on the arm drag option
I have at least three different footwork options that I like when setting this up, so I may try to do a deep dive on the short drag in a future MATREP.
Instead, today, I want to share a specific example of how coaching has made me a better player.
Historically, I have had a very good short drag. For a while it was not just my go-to front headlock escape, it was my only front headlock escape. But as with anything that you use a lot, people get wise to it. I don’t have as much success with it these days as I used to. Perhaps one in five times, I get it really clean and smooth and it “just feels right”. The other four times, the opponent finds a way to make me feel bunched up and unable to slide out from underneath them.
I believe I found the missing piece. When I was successful, I was doing something reflexively that I wasn’t doing when I was unsuccessful. It didn’t occur to me what that thing was until I tried to coach the technique and saw some people running into the same problem (and some people sliding right by it.)
The key is to get yourself out of the way
A short shuffle off-line towards the top player’s chinstrap arm is all it takes.
The top player wants the bottom player parallel to them, heads facing in opposite directions, but bodies in a line. This orientation allows the attacker to apply clean pressure to the back of the bottom player’s head, creating the canopener motion that is so important for the success of all the front headlock strangles (guillotine, anaconda, D’arce).
It follows logically that the bottom player wants to change that angle. The angle change can be slight, 5 or 10 degrees may be enough to start creating wiggle room for your head.
Even more importantly, this shuffle off-line creates a hole for the top player to fall into when the bottom player performs the arm drag. If the bottom player tries to drag without creating this hole, they simple drag the top player tighter down onto them. When the bottom player does create this hole, they’re much more likely to drag the top player into it.
Now that we know how to get out of the way, we will know before we even attempt to pull whether or not our drag will succeed. We have a solid, logical formula for one of our three primary escapes — if I shuffle step and they don’t follow, then drag them into the hole I just vacated.
Good Hunting,
Charles