The Mat Report is back by popular demand!
I recall being a white belt and having an instructor who refused to teach the other side of the class move in the same session. I think he was trying to keep from robbing people of having success with the move. I imagine the thinking went something like, “If I give them both sides of the technique then when they go to execute, it’ll just stalemate.” Or maybe he didn’t even have a reason why, maybe he just taught the way that he was taught.
Whatever his reasons for his style, I still learned from him, and I’m thankful for that. But I have a love/hate relationship with tradition. I appreciate the techniques that have been handed down to me. Without them, I’d be so off in the weeds trying to “do martial arts” that I’d be old and tired by the time I got there. But with every technique that I am given these days, I’m always trying to take it apart, turn it upside down, look at it from all angles.
The tradition-lovers don’t approve.
The technique is already good the way it is, all I can hope to do in changing it is make it worse.
I disagree.
At a minimum, by investigating the technique fully, I can more effectively embody and execute it.
But I can do better than that. If I can figure out why a technique works, which moving parts achieve which goals and in what order, I can take those moving parts and maybe use them elsewhere, or even recombine them with other compatible parts to solve novel problems.
Let’s make this less abstract
I’m playing a lot of K-guard these days. I love how dynamic it is. Because my low leg is controlling the space between my opponent’s hip and armpit I can attack the upper body as though I am in closed guard. Because my high leg is not needed to maintain my position, I can place it wherever it best serves my attack such as constantly worrying at my opponents head and neck, threatening submission or hanging weight upon them. Because my legs are on the outside of my opponent’s legs, I can move laterally and invert freely and can switch back and forth between attacking upper and lower body without changing my orientation.
But if you search K-guard online, you’re unlikely to hear about this dynamism. Instead, you’ll find tons of great videos describing nuanced details and intricate setups. Try turning the sound off. Thats where I learn how to deconstruct the moves. Ignore what they’re saying, watch what they’re doing.
Which pieces of the technique are necessary?
Which pieces are just nice to have?
For my K-guard right now, it all revolves around my low leg hooked on their same-side hip with my knee dropping to the inside of their thigh towards the mat.
So long as my leg inhabits that space, I am one, at most two, grips away from a viable attack upon either my opponent’s upper body, or their balance, or both. In practice, from any other guard, if things are not progressing as preferred, and an opportunity presents itself to insert my low leg into position, I can be playing K-guard in one move, even if I have grips for a totally different thing going at the moment. Bonus, a savvy defender will feel the threat, attend to it, and perhaps allow me a new opportunity on the attack I was originally pursuing.
There’s a lot to be said about the value of the formulaic details.
Knowing the 20 step sequence to submission teaches you where all the relevant control points are, but it doesn’t teach you how to enter into the formula part way. It doesn’t tell you what to do when your opponent knows the formula too and knows the counter-formula.
Try this simpler, more open-ended approach. Take your preferred position, ask yourself what are the bare minimum grips and orientation needed to maintain and progress it, explore, and then, only after you’ve built your own frame of reference, run your results through the filter of the inherited formula.
You’ll be surprised by the results. Once you get good at the process, you’ll see that there are areas of the formula that are unnecessary or irrelevant. There will be other areas that are better solutions than the ones you developed on your own. And, there’ll even be solutions that you’ve found that weren’t a part of the formula at all.
Good Hunting,
Charles Batey