Mini Ep. 49: Phases of Guard

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. 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 in this week's mini episode, I want to talk about the three phases of guard. This is a mental model that I learned from Rob Bernacki when he explains how the guard works. He breaks it down into three distinct phases: the engagement phase, the maintenance phase, and the retention phase. And there's a different strategy for each of those phases. I'm going to talk about each of those phases and what to do in all of those situations. But before we do, let's just first talk about how to play the guard conceptually. People who have listened to BJJ Mental Models for a while probably know that I'm not a big fan of trying to memorize and recall every single possible technique and variation within Jiu-Jitsu. I just don't think that's an effective way to learn. If you're trying to turn Jiu-Jitsu into a game of memorizing and recalling every individual detail, you're going to have massive cognitive load, you're going to forget things a lot, and it's going to be really hard for you to figure out the right answer on the fly because you've turned Jiu-Jitsu into a game of memorization. This particular way of thinking about the guard in these three phases is really helpful because it simplifies the thinking around the guard and what to do in each of those phases. And if you play those phases correctly, then eventually the correct technique, whatever that may be for the situation, should materialize. And that's a lot less detail that you've got to keep in your head at any given moment. So let's first talk about the engagement phase of guard, the first phase. This is where you're making contact with your opponent, you're trying to win the grip fight, and you're trying to settle into a guard. So if you're on the bottom, your opponent is on the top, you haven't gripped up yet, or maybe you have gripped up, but those grips are just very fluid and nothing has really been established yet. We would call that the engagement phase of guard. It's basically what happens before you and your opponent settle into an established, known, recognized guard position. So the engagement phase, a lot of it is about grip fighting and about being conservative. The thing that I have said many times, and we've done a mini episode about this, is that grips dictate position in Jiu-Jitsu. Whoever wins the grip fight is probably going to get to decide what the position looks like next. So that's why the engagement phase is important because this is where you establish the grip fight. Now, when you are playing guard or when you are in someone's guard, one of the main features of the guard is just the sheer number of variables that come into play. There are so many things that can happen. The guard is a very chaotic position because there are so many options for both the person on the top and on the bottom. And part of what we try to do during the engagement phase is reduce that chaos and make the fight more predictable for ourselves. So the engagement phase is often defined as, I'm I'm maybe playing at a bit of a range. I'm not super close to you yet because what I'm trying to do is get close to you with the grips that I want before you can get the grips that you want and ultimately start a passing sequence. The engagement phase is generally played very carefully, conservatively, frugally. You want to be very deliberate during the engagement phase because if you make a mistake during the engagement phase and you lose the grip fight, you are now fighting from behind and you don't want to do that. So the whole goal of the engagement phase is to enter the guard with the look that you want, with the grips that you want, so that when you get there, you are in a much better position to hold and establish that guard. Think about what would happen if you neglected the engagement phase, if you just tried to jump into a guard on someone. If there's nothing really holding them in place or there's nothing preventing them from getting grips on you while you do it, it's really easy for them to then just pass you or do whatever they want because you're not holding them in position. So, during the engagement phase, the number one thing that we're looking for is being careful, frugal, and conservative. We're making sure that we're not doing anything that would give our opponent dominant grips on us. Meanwhile, we are trying to get dominant grips on them. And once someone creates an opening, once you've got the grips that you want, maybe you've created some Kuzushi, that's when you can use that to enter into the next phase of guard, which Rob calls the maintenance phase. The maintenance phase of guard is what guard probably looks like to most people. If you watch a Jiu-Jitsu instructional and they're breaking down a recognized, known guard, like butterfly guard or closed guard, you're in the engagement phase at that point. The paint has basically started to dry. You and your opponent have locked up and you've settled into a position. And now it comes down to who is better able to fight from there, the person on the bottom who wants to sweep or submit, or the person on the top who wants to pass or alternately submit. The maintenance phase is where most of the recognized guards and positions and techniques that you get taught are going to appear. When you're in class and they're teaching you a guard technique, odds are they're probably teaching you something from the maintenance phase of guard. So there's a lot of work that happens in the maintenance phase of guard. But the important thing to understand is that you don't want to skip the engagement phase. Way too many people go right to the maintenance phase. They completely forget about the engagement phase where we try to enter the guard with good grips, with good positioning, maybe getting some Kuzushi on our opponent. A lot of people skip that because they're so eager to get into the technique that they visually recognize because their coach taught it to them or they saw it on a video somewhere. So if you are finding that when you try to play a guard, people pass you instantly, that's probably an indication that you're not putting enough effort into the engagement phase and you're skipping right to the maintenance phase because that's something that you visually recognize. Never underestimate the importance of the engagement phase at the beginning. That opening grip fight, it is one of the most important parts of the guard, that opening attack. How do you get in close to the person, get the grips that you want without letting them do it to you? If you try to get to the maintenance phase without first winning the engagement phase, you're going to have a bad time. So my suggestion is, and this is something that Rob has said on our podcast, stay in the engagement phase until you get the exact grips, the exact look, the exact perspective that you want, and then you can try to move into the maintenance phase and play a guard. Similarly, if you don't want to get pulled into the other person's guard, which is very important, if you start getting sucked into the maintenance phase, one way that you can deal with that is to try to reverse course and back out to force your opponent to play the engagement phase again. You never want to be that person who just walks into their opponent's guard without thinking about it, letting them establish whatever grips they want. Um, this to me is a big strategic error. If you just enter your opponent's guard and let them lock up whatever grips they desire, that would be like driving your car into a ditch to see if you can drive it out again. I would recommend instead that you would try to avoid driving your car into that ditch. And the way that you do that in Jiu-Jitsu is you don't enter a guard, either as the person on top or on the bottom, until you have the exact grips and setup that you want. If you don't have that yet, then you keep working on that until you get what you want and then you establish a guard. So the actual maintenance phase is where the bulk of the recognizable guard work comes into play. This is where the person on the bottom is looking for a sweep or a submission, the person on the top is looking for a pass or a submission. And when the person on top starts to succeed in getting that pass, there comes a point where the person on the bottom needs to change their strategy. They are no longer working on maintaining the guard and attacking from the guard. They are now working on trying to retain the guard because there is a danger of their opponent passing. Normally, this happens when your opponent clears your knee line. Danher might sometimes call this the J-point. Basically, when the person on top is passing, once they are able to get past your knees, you as the person on bottom now have a very narrow window to retain that guard or come up with another option to maintain a decent position before your opponent completes a pass. So this is what we would call the third and final phase of guard, the retention phase of guard. At this point, your main options as the person on the bottom, they could be to try to reguard, could be to turtle away, could be to try to wrestle up. But in any event, you are now in a situation where it's only a matter of time until the person passes your guard unless you do something about it. So those are the three main phases of guard: engagement, maintenance, and retention. And you'll notice again that we're not talking about any particular position here. We're just talking about big ideas. So just to quickly recap what you should be doing from each of these phases. In the first phase, the engagement phase, whether you're the person on top or on bottom, you are looking to establish dominant grips, meaning I'm not just grabbing them, but I've got grips where I can actually control them and they can't control me. I might be looking to create a bit of Kuzushi so that I can more easily enter the guard that I want or the passing strategy that I want. In any event, I am not letting the position stabilize and solidify until I have the right conditions to begin playing guard or passing the way that I want to. Once that's all settled and the position solidifies into a guard, we're now in the maintenance phase. And this is where the person on bottom is really trying to sweep or submit and the person on top is really trying to pass or submit. Once the person on top starts clearing the person's legs and there's a legitimate threat of passing because they've passed the guard player's knees, this is now where we've entered the retention phase of guard. If nothing changes for the person on bottom, they will lose guard. So the person on bottom is now forced to react and defend or get to another decent position. So the three phases of guard: engagement phase, maintenance phase, retention phase. I really encourage you to think about all of the things that you like to do in guard and map them to which of these phases they belong in. And try to identify, are there any phases I'm missing? Is there anything that I'm not doing? Maybe I've got really good tactics for when I'm in the maintenance phase of guard. Maybe I'm really good at retaining guard, but maybe I'm ignoring that engagement phase, which could really matter. You have to play all three phases of guard if you want to be a good guard player or a good guard passer. So, a big topic here. We've talked about this quite extensively on the BJJ Mental Models podcast. If you want to learn more about the phases of guard there, go back and check out some of our earlier episodes where we broke down all three of these phases. I will put links to those in the show notes to make it easier. If you want more like this, everything we make lives at BJJmentalmodels.com, including all episodes of our free main podcast, mini episodes like this, our newsletter, and of course, if you want to join BJJ Mental Models Premium and level up your Jiu-Jitsu with us, that is the best way to do that. It's all at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll talk to you in the next one.