Mini Ep. 50: Phases of Passing

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in jiu-jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in jiu-jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And it's hard to believe that we've done 50 of these mini episodes now. These mini episodes have been long running enough that just by themselves, they're probably more long-lived than most of the jiu-jitsu podcasts out there. It's been a pleasure to make these for people. I've had a ton of positive feedback about how effectively these can be used to bring people up to speed on the BJJ Mental Models systems of thinking. So thank you so much for everyone who shared their feedback about these mini episodes with me. And I do encourage you, if you have any further feedback, if there's anything that you'd like to see us change about these, or if you have any topics that you want to see us cover, just write in and let me know and I'd be happy to do those. Speaker 1: Today in our 50th mini episode, I want to flip the script on the conversation we had in the last one. So, I'll put a link in the show notes, but in the last mini episode, we talked about the three phases of guard, the engagement phase, the maintenance phase, and the retention phase. And in this episode, I want to talk about the three phases of passing. And we would define those as number one, disentangle, number two, control, number three, pass. I was first introduced to this concept when I was training with my old coach, and I was really struggling to figure out how to get past his guard. I was just getting tied up. And he gave me this advice. He said, Steve, there's three phases to passing. Disentangle, control, pass. And learning to think of passing the guard in those three phases was tremendously helpful to me, because before this, I was so focused on trying to do a pass as I'd seen it in instruction, like a knee cut pass or a toreado. I was so focused on trying to do that, that I was skipping important phases in the passing sequence. Some of the phases that aren't entirely obvious to beginners, um, if people haven't talked you through the concepts. So as an example, if I want to do a guard pass on you, if you've got dominant grips on me and you're holding me inside your guard, my ability to pass you is going to be very limited. Speaker 1: Similarly, maybe I am able to defeat your grips, but I'm not properly controlling your body. What's going to happen then is the guard player will likely either retain their guard, turtle or wrestle up. I'm not holding them in position, so there's no obligation for the guard player to let me pass them. So much like how with the three phases of guard, engagement, maintenance and retention, we need to go through those in sequence. It's the same with the three phases of passing. We need to disentangle, control and pass. Too many people just go to the last phase, just pass. They have a pass in their head that they want to do and they go for it. Maybe they even spam it. I have been guilty of this myself where I want to hit one pass so much, I just keep trying it again and again and again. But unless you've disentangled yourself and unless you've established control of your opponent, it's going to be very unlikely you're going to pass successfully. Speaker 1: So I'm going to give a really basic example of what this might look like. If I am in your guard, the first thing I need to do is disentangle myself from your grips if they are dominant grips, if you're able to control me. I don't want any situation where you as the guard player can break my posture or pull my arms or legs out of alignment. I want to make sure that I can move freely without you having dominant grips on me. So the first thing you must do if you want to pass guard is disentangle yourself from their dominant grips. Now you might be listening to this and thinking, what is a dominant grip? We covered this in a prior mini episode. A dominant grip is basically where you've got a grip on someone and with that grip, you can control them, but they cannot control you. Uh and that's an important distinction because there's a lot of grips that are not dominant. Sometimes you just grab onto someone, but they can turn that grip against you quite easily. You don't have the ability to control their body with that grip. That's not a dominant grip. You want dominant grips. So when I am trying to pass someone's guard, the first thing I need to do is disentangle from them, so they do not have any dominant grips. Speaker 1: If you've ever seen a white belt attempt to pass the guard and then get swept during the pass, that is probably because they tried to pass without disentangling the grips first. And that means that when they try to pass, they're wide open for a sweep because the other person has controlling grips on them while they're trying to pass. But just disentangling isn't enough. You need to also control the person. As you pass, you need to make sure that you can hold the person on bottom in a position where you can actually pass the guard and keep them there. And that control is very important. Beginners especially are way too eager to pass the guard quickly, and they often ignore the importance of controlling the person on the bottom. And this can lead to situations where during the pass, you get swept, the other person wrestles up, um maybe they granby away. Those happen because you failed to control them. There's a lot of different ways that you can control someone. When you go for things like far underhooks, that's an example of controlling the person, same with a cross face. There's many ways to do it. But the important thing is, you want to have their shoulders pinned onto the mat. If the person can get up to their side, then it's going to be a lot harder for you to pass their guard. To really complete a guard pass, you want their shoulders pinned to the mat. And you'll notice that most of those things that we do, like get an underhook or cross face the person, those are all done with the intent of keeping their shoulders pinned to the mat. Speaker 1: And of course, you don't just want to pin their shoulders to the mat, you also want to hold them there. That's where things like establishing a chest-to-chest connection come into play. If you can do that to someone, get their shoulders on the mat and then get chest-to-chest with them, it can be really hard for them to deny the guard pass. Then and only then, after you've disentangled from their grips and you've established control, only then do you complete the pass. The passing is actually the last step and the least important step in the guard passing sequence. So if you think about things, you'll notice that these three phases are kind of the inverse of the phases of guard that we talked about in the previous mini episode. In that episode, we talked about the phases of guard being the engagement phase, the maintenance phase, and the retention phase. Well, here if you want to pass, the three phases of passing are disentangle, control, and pass. And these are all kind of direct attacks on all three of those phases of guard. Speaker 1: Now, of course, if you want to make guard passing easy, it's better if you don't let them get control of you in the first place. So this is why the engagement phase of guard is important. If I can enter a guard pass before you can even establish a guard and get to the maintenance phase, it's way easier for me to pass because I don't have to try to break your guard first. So, you'll hear a lot of good grapplers talk about this as a passing strategy. Don't just walk into the person's guard. Stay at a distance, again, win that engagement phase, and that way, you don't even need to disentangle because you never got entangled in the first place. So again, that's just a really important lesson when it comes to how we think about guard, both from the player and the passer's perspective. There are three phases. You don't want to skip any of these phases. And in the context of passing, those three phases are disentangle, control, pass. And if you think of any guard pass that you like to do, cross-reference that against this framework and ask yourself, am I doing something intelligent at each of these three phases? If you don't have a good game plan for how to disentangle or how to establish control, then you're going to get into a lot of situations where trying to pass the guard either fails or backfires. Speaker 1: I hope this helps. I really like these kinds of episodes. There's a lot more of this at BJJmentalmodels.com where you can get all of our full-length episodes, plus all of our mini episodes like this completely free. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter, which I definitely recommend you do if you want to get some really cool thought pieces in your inbox every week. Again, all of that is completely free. Or if you want to invest in your jiu-jitsu journey and level up with us, that's what BJJ Mental Models Premium is for. That's our library of jiu-jitsu audio courses, master classes on strategy, tactics, mindset philosophy, the kind of stuff that video instructionals don't normally cover. You'll also get access to amazing premium only podcasts by ace coaches like Emily Kwok and Rob Bernacki. And you'll get access to our amazing community as well. Plus you can also level up and we will support you both as coaches and as business consultants if that's what you need to succeed at your jiu-jitsu goals. I'll put links to all of that in the show notes, but let's keep it simple. It all lives at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks again for listening to this one. 50 mini episodes in the bank, can't wait for the next 50. Thank you so much for hanging out with me through this journey and we'll talk to you in the next one.