Ep. 332: Half Guard Passing, feat. Mo Black

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 BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 332. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach, and I'm here today with a first-timer, but someone I have long wanted to have on the podcast. I've got Mo Black. Mo, how's it going? It's going great, Steve. Thanks so much for having me on today. I am always happy to have someone like you here on the podcast. I mean, we've got a lot of mutuals, and of course, you have been tearing it up on the competition scene. It seems like you are everywhere I go these days. So, I don't even know to what extent an intro is really required, but I always give people the the chance to do this. So, why don't you give yourself just a quick introduction? Tell people about who you are and where they may know you from. Yeah, so my name is Mo Black or Morgan if you want to go full name. I've been training since 2012 and I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I'm one of the owners at Tabula Rasa Jiu-Jitsu, but most likely people know me from first winning, um, ADCC East Coast trials, and then silver at West Coast, and then eventually getting to compete at the championships, and most recently I took silver at No-Gi Worlds. So. Amazing. Congratulations on all of that. And hey, we should probably put a plug here. We'll put it at the end as well, but you've got an awesome gym out there in Colorado. If people want to train with you, how can they find you and how can they contact you? Yeah, so our gym is Tabula Rasa Jiu-Jitsu, or we also just go by Tabs for short. We do have an Instagram page, Tabs BJJ, and honestly, they can reach out to me personally at Mo Jiu-Jitsu on Instagram as well, but we love having visitors, so if anybody is ever in the area in Colorado Springs, um, we'd love to have them come through. Amazing. And I always put links to the stuff in the show notes, which I will do here as well. But today we had a topic, Mo, that we wanted to talk about, wanted to dig into something a bit educational, and this is something you mentioned you've been working on a lot recently. I will turn it over to you to maybe drive this then. You wanted to talk about half-guard passing. Why don't you go ahead and kind of introduce this and what made you consider this as sort of the topic to discuss here today? Yeah, so one of the things that I love about Jiu-Jitsu is maybe it's weird to say, but I love the passing side of Jiu-Jitsu. And also when I think about, you know, where I could potentially bring value is probably some of the things that I've been able to battle test in competition, and passing half-guard is definitely one of them. So, I thought that would be a good topic for today, and kind of focusing on two main avenues, kind of passing on the perimeter of half-guard if we can't get through the frames, and then passing inside the frames. Sounds good to me. So this is an interesting philosophy to discuss here when you're passing someone's half-guard, kind of how do you go about doing this? And I often tell people, if you want to really simplify the way that you think about guard passing, yeah, there's endless variations of passes you can do, but at the end of the day, there's not that many ways that you can get around someone's legs, right? You can go through them, you can go around them. That's pretty much it. I mean, if you want to be super athletic, maybe you can go over them, I don't know. But Right, you got some backflip passing in your future. Yeah. Not for me, but maybe for some of the youngins. But my point being that really at the end of the day, regardless of what pass you're trying to do, either you are trying to you're trying to get around their frames one way or the other, either by going around the outside around their legs or by going through the inside. I'll turn it over to you to maybe explain and give some examples about what this looks like. So, how would this kind of map to the techniques that people know in the gym? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing about talking about passing half-guard is one, we can force half-guard. So, one of the things that I like to think about is even if I'm outside of somebody's guard, right, their feet are kind of in front of me still, maybe they're open guard scenario, or maybe we've just broken out of something like closed guard, right? Trapping their foot. And a lot of times it can be a small angle to the side, almost thinking like a 45-degree angle to the side, and then I'm going to kind of stuff their foot underneath my inside leg and sit down on it. So, my knees are on the mat, right, their foot is stuck. And the first thing that kind of happens there is now we've dictated where we're passing from, right? One, they can't get back to closed guard, which is great. Two, if I stay heavy on that foot, they can't really retract it. So now we've trapped the foot, forcing half-guard and kind of starting our entries there. Then the next step, I almost think about it like a setup, and I had a great wrestling coach who was always like, you know, the heavy setup is key, right? If we think of something like a collar tie and we're snapping our partner down, usually we get a reaction off of that. If they bring their posture up, that's a great time to go for our double leg to get inside the hips. If you snap them down and they keep their head down, well, now that's a good time to go over the top of the head. So, same kind of thing here where I'm going to set up my pass. So now that we're in half-guard, and a lot of times these days, if you either have somebody who likes to play half-guard, or you force somebody there, often times you see a knee shield. So their top knee is up, and the first thing that I like to do is just starting to pressure that frame. Put some weight on it and kind of see what your partner's giving you as far as reaction from there. And when you have really good, you know, you're going against somebody who's a really good Jiu-Jitsu athlete, they're experienced, right? Sometimes it's going to take a lot of pressure on those frames and a little bit of patience to see exactly where they're going to kind of get out of position to help you dictate, okay, what's my next step? Yeah. I really like that idea of letting them kind of make a move, putting some pressure on them to see how they respond, and then playing through it. Something that I observe a lot with many beginners is that they tend to have in their head the idea of what pass they want to do, and then they try to force it against all odds, regardless of what their opponent is doing, and if they're giving them the right energy. And that can obviously be a problem. If you really want to do a knee-cut pass, but they are putting up all of the defenses to make that difficult, and you just keep insisting on it, you know, best-case scenario, you're not going to get very far. But worst-case scenario, they're going to start reading your intentions, and because you're telegraphing what you're doing, they're going to exploit that. So, I love the idea of kind of just putting a little bit of weight on top of their legs just to see how they respond, and then kind of reactively playing from there. Take kind of choosing, rather than going in there with a technique in mind that you want to do, go in there with the idea of I'm just going to make them uncomfortable, I'm going to disrupt their body's alignment, and we'll see what they do. And how they react changes the way that I might react afterwards. Exactly. So I talk about it a ton of my classes, and then I also think of it, you know, as an athlete myself, as I'm starting to build these positions, you know, like as we're putting pressure in that frame, just like you're saying, not thinking of like, this is the pass that I'm going to hit. Likely when I go into even a competition match, but even in the room, I'm going to start pressuring, and then I like to think of it as path of least resistance, right? What is my partner giving me here? So we're not, you know, fighting against them, but kind of like working with their reaction to get into these better positions. Got it, got it. In terms of technically, how do you do that? What moves do you find normally happen? So I'm, I don't know, let's say I'm standing in your guard, right, in your full guard. I put some pressure down on your leg, I start kind of going into like a half-guard type position. How do you normally find this works? Are you kind of doing this from the feet where you're in almost like a split squat, or do you prefer to kind of get down low on your knees and pass in a more traditional sense? Yeah, so I definitely like starting low, especially my goal is to try to keep a foot covered and keep somebody in half-guard, especially if they don't want to be there, or, you know, a great example of this is if you've ever gone against a good closed-guard player, oh, they're so hard to deal with. So it's like, once you open up their guard and you get that foot covered, I prefer to start on my knees. And this is kind of where we have this initial, you know, kind of avenue, um, that we're going to give our partner, they can pick one or the other, and that's either going to be our weave or getting inside those frames. So a lot of times, if I want to weave pass, I'm going to start to scoop that, uh, kind of like an underhook on that top leg, on their knee shield, and pressure in. Now, if they don't give me any reaction back, I can start working into the frames. But a lot of times when people try to correct their position, they kind of bring that knee a little bit lower, that shin's a little bit more underneath your chest, and then I'm going to kind of use my chest over the top of their knee to then force them into more of a weave position so that their knees are pinched together, and now that's where we're going to start to work around the perimeter a little bit more. Yeah. I also love the the same strategy. If I can get someone into some sort of half-guard, so I can clear one of their legs, which is normally my focus, I like to immediately drop down low and kind of sit down on their feet, sort of like you're talking about. I know there are things you can do from standing there, but I'm not the best leg locker in the world, and I don't want to have to deal with people who are. So, I generally find that when I am in someone's guard, as soon as I get an opportunity to kneel down and kind of hold them in position, I would prefer to do that rather than get into a whole bunch of big dynamic movements. And I have found personally this idea of let's forget about the guard pass, let's just try to get to half-guard. Let's just focus on clearing and pinning one of those legs. That makes it such a much better position for me to then continue to proceed from there. I've found it much easier to settle in into a half-guard and pass from there than to pass from someone's full guard or open guard. So, these days rather than trying to just do like a pass right from a fully established guard with both legs in front of me, my focus is normally, can I pin or contain one of these legs? And from there, once I get into that split squat or a kind of a kneeling half-guard, then I can start doing passes that to me at least have a much higher percentage. Yes, totally agree with that. I love the weave pass because you can do it gi or no-gi, you know, and then I kind of use almost like my wrestling, like head position. I'm I love the like, you know, head in the way kind of passing style here. So as soon as we get those knees kind of pinched together, then I'm going to start putting my head in the way. I tell people, kind of like where you'd imagine having a unicorn horn, you'd be stabbing your partner in kind of the torso. So even though they're still kind of on their side, you know, we don't have them pinned shoulders to the mat, we have good control with our head kind of inside their their frames a little bit, and then looking for some sort of upper body grip. So I'm going to take, you know, if I have a gi, I'll go for a bottom collar. If I have, you know, somebody in no-gi, I can even just pin their wrist or even get a chin strap if they're really curled into you. And then that's when we can really, now that we have like knees folded together, we have some sort of upper body control is when we can really start like, okay, now we're starting to look kind of the next next step to pass there. I love that you brought up the importance of head position when you're passing the guard. I've got a a friend, Jesse Walker, from Rough Hands BJJ, and he does this a lot where he does like a modified Sao Paulo pass where he basically uses his head to just drive into your sternum and hold you in place, and it sucks. Like it it's not something that you see very often, but people tend to neglect the importance of head position and head placement in a situation like this. We tend to be so focused on what we're doing with our hands and even with our legs once we get a bit more experienced. But against a good grappler, you need every tool that you have. And in half-guard, if you can use your head kind of as a way to wedge the person in place or to keep them pinned, that frees up your hands to do other things. So a big part of my passing game, if I'm in someone's half-guard, is I like to get my head relatively close to theirs so that I can start pinning them in position with my head, and then my hands are free to actually complete and secure the pass and get into a better position. So a common mistake that I think people make from that position is forgetting the power of using your head. I mean, you don't have the same dexterity, of course, that you do with your hands where you can grab onto stuff, but man, if someone drives their head into you, it sucks. It's a really good way to maintain space and to also hold people in position. As long as you make sure you don't get choked, it's a very powerful tool. Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. And one of the things that I actually really like keeping my head in the way in passing positions for is also it it uh prevents, you know, your partner from elevating you and getting to your legs. You know, you kind of have that stopper in between you and your own hips, right? So maybe if we have that leg covered, but you know, you have a lot of sneaky people out there that'll get, you know, that top knee shield maybe becomes a butterfly hook or something like that. If I can still keep my head in the way, I have a lot of different frames that they still have to get rid of to be able to kind of start to elevate and get underneath me. So, you know, our head position is is uh key for a lot of those. And I use my head a ton when I'm passing, a ton. So, yeah, and then once we get out to like angles and stuff, we have our head in the way, right, we can kind of rest our whole body weight on our head that's on our partner, as long as we have good position here. So, as soon as we get that head in the way, we've got their knees pinched together, we can now start working to free our leg, um, that's still kind of in between their legs, and we can sprawl out, or a lot of times you can like back kick, so that we can now get out almost teed out to our partner. And then there becomes another, you know, what's our path of least resistance? If I tee out to my partner, my head is in the way, and you can just tell they're super uncomfortable, sometimes you can drive right into side control. You have somebody who's really stubborn and they're like, nope, I'm staying curled up, I'm turning into you. That's a great time to go around the head, which obviously is a lot more motion, but often times you can get back attacks from there, Kimura traps, even to north-south. You know, but we're past the guard, so it's like, phew. How much of a rush are you in to get past the guard in the first place? Because I find that a lot of the time, if I get someone in a really good half-guard pin, like I'm chest-to-chest down on top of them, and I've got my head up next to theirs and they can't move, sometimes I can just sort of feel that this is so miserable for this person that maybe I'm better off just hanging out here and just kind of whittling away at their energy bar a little bit, rather than being in a big rush to pass. Now, of course, there are strategy considerations there because it depends on the rule set you're under and what the clock says, but what are your thoughts on how quickly someone should pass from half-guard? When is the time that someone should actually advance position and try to get out of that half-guard and into side control or whatever the next position in the sequence would be? Yeah, I think it really depends on what kind of pass you're doing and how much control you have. Um, I know that you talked about the concept of like the ladder with Christian Woodmansee, right? And you talked about the ladder and about, you know, how much control of your partner's body you have. So if you are in a pinning position where you have control of the shoulders, you have control of the head, you know, that's one of the positions where it's like, no rush at all, right? Like we can stay here all day, let the person on bottom struggle, you know, cook them a little bit. With some of these other passes, like the weave is one of them where I have good control over their knees, but are we truly inside their frames? No, they still kind of have their knees in the way, they're still on their side, so we don't really have shoulders or hips pinned. So you kind of have to expect that once you get out to the side, you know, I'm still trying to pressure them. I still want them to carry my weight, but I also have to be prepared that I don't have them as pinned. I don't have as much control. So therefore, there's going to be more movement for both my partner and me, right? I might have to to act a little bit faster since I don't have as much control as I would with like a inside pass where I'm chest-to-chest and we can sit there and cook a little bit longer. Yeah, that's a great point. How much are they suffering? If you are in a guard where you're sort of lean, you know, you're putting weight down on top of their shins or their legs, depending on the angle, that can be real bad for them or it can be totally fine for them. You brought up, for example, a knee shield, right? If I'm sort of sitting back and you're blocking me with a knee shield, if my weight isn't right down on top of you, fatiguing your legs, then you're probably happy to be there. But if I start, you know, actually trying to float up on top of you and make you carry my body weight, then that becomes a bit more advantageous. So I always think to myself when I'm in that position, am I making this person work? Because I regardless of whether I'm top on top or on bottom, I always want to be making them do the work rather than myself. So, I kind of try to feel, who is actually doing the work in this position? And if they're the ones who are doing the work, I know I can hold that position as long as I want. But if I'm the one who's having to do the work, because that usually means their frames are still good, then that means I don't want to hang out there. I want to start trying to get a reaction going. I want to start trying to create openings so that I can do what you talked about earlier, which is going to be try to get like around their legs or get between their legs, try to defeat those frames somehow. Mhm, exactly. So let's expand a little bit on that. Let's maybe walk through these two different options. What are the two ways that you kind of normally wind up attacking from the half-guard? You mentioned that you kind of go around or you go through, correct? Correct. Correct. I would say those are the two main, and then there's obviously the, you know, those little layers in between that can kind of, you know, be maybe like an in-between pass. But I love weave passing, I love outside passing, partially because, you know, uh, going back to people who are great at leg entanglements and stuff like that, not being fully committed into their body where I can kind of stay a little bit more shallow, and again, keep my head in the way, keep my hands in the way. You know, so we can hand fight and head fight there a little bit and keep our position. And then using that weave pass to, one of the things that one of the places I love to be is if I can get to the back, like best-case scenario for me. So, the weave pass with them still being on their side, you know, there is the risk of more movement, just as we were talking about, but what it also does is, you know, it's very common that people are going to try to turtle, right? Or if they stay kind of stubborn and turn into you, uh, really hard, and then you're able to capitalize on moving around their head and towards their back, it can often open up avenues to attack the back, which I'll take any day over almost any other position. So, maybe I'm trying to weave, I'm trying to pin their knees together, and they're like, nope, none of that. But often times, if you start pressuring those frames, again, if you have a setup, right? So I'm starting to come over the top for a weave, and I'm trying to bring their knees together. As they try to correct that position, often times it gives you this window of getting inside their frames. So, we're already covered the above the feet, right? But then once we can get past that frame of the knee, well, now we're inside the hips, right? And the first place I like to go there is trying to take my outside knee, so my knee that isn't stuck, and put it right into the pocket of their hip, and then I'm going to kind of pinch over their bottom leg, so they can't bring that out to create a frame there. And then from there, that's when we can start to kind of drive up the body, look for chest-to-chest connection. Double unders on the arms, I think is like superior. It's definitely harder to get. A cross-face and an underhook on the far side is also great. But then as soon as we get inside those frames, and we can pin their shoulders, and we've pinned their hips, that's kind of where, you know, we start, you know, slowing down a little bit, we're chilling, let them struggle a little bit, let them do the work as you said, you know, and then looking to free that leg, free that knee, um, and we can go mount, you know, knee slice, three-quarter mount, we have so many options there, even back attacks from there as well. That's a a great point. When you're trying to pass someone's half-guard, most of the time what you want to do is try to keep their shoulders pinned to the mat somehow. And there's a lot of ways to do that. A cross-face, like you mentioned, is a very powerful way to kind of force someone to look away, and that can be essential in trying to hold both of their shoulders down. But echoing onto your point, a very common mistake that I've observed is people will sometimes get so desperate and so needy to get that cross-face that they will reach before it's time to do so. And look, I've always said that if you can grab and control someone by the head in Jiu-Jitsu, that's almost always a good thing. But you need to make sure that in the process of getting to their head, you don't expose yourself to anything bad that could happen. A common example that I see is if I am sitting in someone's knee shield half-guard, if I try to reach up and grab their head, but because of body dimensions, that requires me to sort of load my body up onto their leg, that can be very bad for me. That can allow them to elevate me, get into leg entanglements, or sweep me. So when you go for the head, much like Christian Woodmansee mentioned in that episode that we did with him, you want to think about climbing their body, climbing that position, the way that you would climbing a ladder. And the head is kind of the end of that. It's the top rung. But you have to get past the other rungs first. If you have not cleared their legs, jumping to try to catch their head can be very dicey because you wind up giving them the opportunity to flip you over or get into your legs or something like that. So normally when you want to go for head control is when you've already cleared everything else, and the last step is to get that cross-face. So I see things similar to you where I love having a cross-face on people, but I'm not in a big rush to get it. I would much rather secure them by the arms or by the lapels or whatever I've got so that I can keep their shoulders pinned flat until I can kind of get past their legs, and that's when I start really worrying about their head, right? Once I've got past the knees specifically, I feel okay grabbing their head most of the time. But if their knees are still in the way, I make a point of being very careful about trying to grab their head. I totally agree. And one of the things that I think about once I get past the knees, to look at it on the opposite side of the coin, because of course, we're working one technique, it's like you always kind of start to see the other side of things. And as a guard player, I actually love half-guard. So one of the things that I talk about a lot is like, when you're playing half-guard, you want to be kind of like a clam, right? You're always on your side and you can kind of, you know, crunch in and kind of crunch out, but you never see a live clam that's like completely open, right? Then you've lost it all. So you don't want to get completely pinned to the mat. So you want to stay in this like almost, you know, crunched position. So, if I have somebody who again, you know, with really experienced grapplers especially, you give them one inch on one of those rungs, right? And it's like, oh no, you know, they're back in the game. Um, not what you want. So as soon as you get past that knee frame, right? Almost thinking about like turning into the hips a little bit, and almost getting perpendicular to the hips, and I still think like elbows tight, just kind of like what you're saying. You don't want to fly up on the head, get super extended, open up a bunch of space for, you know, our bottom partner to do something with, right? So, kind of turning into the hips first, and I can even start to flatten the hips with my chest and my body, and then start, you know, wiggling my hand up so that I can get underneath an arm or get to my cross-face, but I'm it's more of a slow process of still taking those little steps to make sure that we're securing our partner along the way. So we don't fly up to the head and open up a lot of space for them to do something with. Got it. When you are going around someone's legs to pass their half-guard versus going through their legs, does that change the way that you do anything? So, I guess an example, just to give people a bit of a visualization, and you tell me if you agree with my definitions. Examples of passes that go around the legs would be things like a Toreando or also known as the Matador pass, or a stack pass. Examples of going through the legs would be something like a knee slice pass. That's probably the most obvious example. And I would love your thoughts on whether you change what you're doing a bit depending on whether you're going for an outside pass or a through pass. Yeah, I would say with the outside pass, you always have to be ready for a quick change in direction, right? Because again, when we are outside passing, we haven't, you know, done our due diligence on controlling all those rungs, get like working up the body and having as much of our partner pinned to the mat. So a lot of times, any time I'm going to do any sort of outside passing, there's more movement, right? I might start passing one way and I got to get ready to go the other, and the other. And with those passing kind of styles, also sometimes be ready to break connection too, right? Your partner's more mobile, you're more mobile, but if they start getting something that looks like it's going to be beneficial to them, you know, and something that I feel like we forget about sometimes is just not accepting whatever they have, right? They get a hook or something like that. It's like, okay, now we have to break out and kind of start our sequence over again. With through passing, we can be way more heavy and patient and kind of, you know, cook our partners. There's still different avenues that we can go down once we even get into, let's say a knee slice, right? Our knees hit the mat, we have good pin on the upper body, right? But maybe I'm going to finish that knee slice. Maybe they're doing a really great job of blocking that side, and so I decide to move my knee to the other side of their body to go to three-quarter mount and start working, you know, down that avenue instead. Um, but I would say that once we're inside the frames, we can be more patient and a lot slower. But if we're outside, you know, it's a little like things can get a little bit more wild out there, you know? It's not as much of cooking and and relaxing. It's like, okay, we got to stay really focused to see where our partner's movement is going to go and try to capitalize, you know, if you start moving to the left, I start passing to the left. Let's say, let's say a Toreando. I start passing to the left and my partner commits super hard, all their frames are facing my legs, not forcing the pass to that left side, but just making a quick change of direction, and often times we can capitalize getting behind the hips, you know, even maybe some sort of back exposure at that point if they really committed. Yeah. A a big difference between an outside pass versus a through pass is how much motion you as the passer need to do. You know, they always say that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Well, with an outside pass, most of the time you're not quite going in a straight line. Sometimes you are. But a lot of the time you have to move your body more because you're going around them, right? You're kind of going around their perimeter. Sometimes that's not so bad, for example, with a stack pass, usually it's not bad. But with a Toreando or with like a long step, you have to do quite a bit of motion to get around their side. And that's fine, especially if motion is kind of your A-game, and there's a lot of people with who it is. But motion does create more variables, both for you and for the other person. So, as you mentioned, if I'm doing an outside pass, if I am going around their legs, I might have to worry about them doing hip escapes or turtling away and granbying. They have there's more opportunities for motion and for something to go wrong. And also it tends to be quite a bit of work. Going through the inside on the other hand is kind of, I think, more of like a old person slow game. I like a lot of going through the inside passes, so for example, a knee cut, because like you mentioned, if I'm sitting down on top of their bottom leg, it's very hard for them to do much of anything. I mean, they can put up a defense, but I'm kind of stapling them to the floor. And the amount of movement I have to do to get the pass done is pretty minimal. I just have to go right through, right? As soon as I can figure out a way to clear their knee, I can just pass. So, there's an efficiency there, but efficiency isn't always, I mean, we always talk about how efficiency is great, and all things being equal, yeah, we probably want to be more efficient when we can. But that doesn't mean we should never use the least or the less efficient options. Doing a Toreando, if the opportunity is there and you're good at it, like go for it. For me, as a lazy old guy, I usually try to do less, but it's absolutely fine to go around the outside. You just have to make sure, like you said, that you are ready to respond when your opponent starts trying to move because they will. Very common mistake, right, is people will get so excited about going through that pass that they'll forget to keep the person held in position, and that gives the person the opportunity to turn away and turtle, and then you've kind of lost the whole thing. Absolutely. Well, and I think sometimes, you know, inside passing is, yeah, if every time, like, I I'm like you, if we could pass like through every time, that would be awesome. People with really strong frames, sometimes it's just really hard to get there. Um, so it's a lot of work on the front end, but once you get there, you know, you're golden. Sometimes with the outside passing, you know, it's still movement on the front end, but the work comes from, okay, now we have to figure out how we're going to stabilize, you know, whatever position we're starting to crash once we get an angle on our partner. So I feel like there's almost a little bit more work on the back end. But what I've noticed and something that I really like, at least at this point in my Jiu-Jitsu, and I might feel differently as I age, but, you know, sometimes I'll use that outside passing or that ability to move, especially if, um, you know, let's even say we're completely disconnected from the guard player on the bottom, right? I kind of have gravity on my side if I'm up on my feet. So I can use that outside motion, you know, to kind of get my partner behind, and then it might allow me to enter into some of that inside passing. And I think sometimes that's where it takes experience to get to that point, right? But kind of finding like, okay, where's our path of least resistance here? Where are our openings? And not being too set on one direction or the other, but like everything can kind of intertwine together. Maybe I'm going to start with my outside passing, but the way that they react, I'm like, oh, now I can crash in, you know, and kind of putting those pieces together. I really like that idea of sort of weaving in and out at different distance levels and through different passing types depending on what your opponent does. Too often people get way too married to a single strategy, and they just they want to go outside. But sometimes for whatever reason, that opportunity just doesn't arise. I find personally that against people with really long legs, it can be hard to do an outside pass because there's just so much leg for me to get around. So a Toreando, for example, is something I just I would not use against someone who's much, much longer than me. But what I do find against those kinds of people is if I can get in close to them, it's extra bad for them. If I can kind of crowd them and get into a knee slice, if they've got longer legs, it's harder for them to deal with that because once I get past their knee, they're probably never going to get it back in place. And this doesn't even get into the kinds of reactions that your opponent can give you where if they're trying to play at distance, yeah, you can play at a distance with them and maybe work on some outside passes, but as soon as you get in close enough, you can switch to something else. And that just makes things less predictable. One thing that I've really settled on is that very rarely, at least for me, does the first guard pass attempt ever work. Especially against a good person, they know what you're doing. The first pass attempt probably won't work. The second probably won't either. But if you chain together enough diverse options, eventually one of them will find its way through. And so I think it's important to not be too committed to a single style of passing because sometimes that style just will not be the open door that you're looking for. Absolutely. And I like that about like, you know, you almost get a little too narrow-minded sometimes and it can really hold you back. Like I've gone into competitions before where I'm like, I am just doing this one thing. And, you know, I'm like, then I watch video later and I'm like, oh my gosh, you missed so many great opportunities because you were so, you know, just focused on on one point. But just like you're saying, if we could layer, you know, and kind of chain some of those attacks together. And another reason why for me personally, it's been huge to have so many different partners. Like I love cross-training. I love like, you know, doing positional or situational rounds where it's like, okay, we're just in half-guard, you know, once somebody scores, it's, you know, then we're, you know, restarting things like that. But getting those different bodies and then kind of exploring in there like, okay, what happens if I try to outside pass a really tall person? Just like you're saying, okay, now we know we need to crash those frames a little bit more. Once we get inside, you know, we're good to go. Some people that are really good at just like off-balancing you, sometimes you get inside those frames and, you know, you've got things like, you know, that knee lever where you people John Wayne sweep and stuff like that. It's like, you know, so many different things to play with and kind of experiment with there. But I think, yeah, finding just like a little bit of ability to flow and chain, you know, your passes together will help you find a lot more avenues of success, I think. Now, you're also a very well-respected coach. And so I would love to get your perspective here on how you teach people, especially people who are maybe purple belt and more junior, how to build a passing game. Because I I think I have a handle on kind of how you think about this for yourself. But when you get someone who's in the room and they're relatively new to this, maybe they just don't know much about passing at all, or maybe they're at that phase in their journey where they've got a few different passes that they can sort of do, but they don't have any kind of connective tissue that ties that into a game plan. How do you as the coach help people figure that out and kind of create their half-guard passing identity, I guess you could call it? Yeah, yeah, so, well, first of all, I really think it's important to think about the individual because there's so many different ways to coach out there, right? And one way that works for one person isn't the same way it's going to work for another. So it definitely depends on the individual to some degree. I definitely try to any time I'm passing, I like to talk about, you know, the concepts of like what we're doing and kind of the the meat and potatoes of what we're doing because, and I know this has been talked about on here quite a bit, but if I just teach to my body's style, right, my body type, and like my style, I'm going to lose some of those people in the room, and we want to be able to teach many people, not just people that are built like us. So I like giving them kind of the concepts behind where we're going, but I also like to show them a couple of different passes in the same positions so that they can kind of experiment with them like, hey, here's a couple. And then it's great because at our gym specifically, we have a lot of people who like, I think of it like collaboration, right? I love when we start discussing techniques and somebody's like, oh, I'm finding, you know, you put your knee here, but I put my knee here, or, you know, you hide your cross-face and your head position over their shoulder, I put it above their head, like, and we have these discussions. And I don't really believe in a lot of hard no's in any position, right? You got to know kind of your foundation before you can really break some of those rules. But, you know, having those discussions along the way of like, okay, as long as we have a why in this position, are you still pinning the shoulders? Am I still pinning the shoulders? Fantastic, then we're both succeeding in this position even if it's a little different. Yeah. I love that insight. This is one of the things about Jiu-Jitsu that's so great, and I think people sometimes take too long to realize this, but you can really customize Jiu-Jitsu and make it your own. You can break the rules as long as like you said, you're kind of still doing the core concept correctly. For example, for a long time, for a long time, I mean, I started training back in 2008, and I was always taught that when you get someone in half-guard, you cross-face them with your near-side arm and you underhook them with the far-side arm, right? I was like, that's how you pass half-guard. And I know now that that is a way to do it, and it is maybe an old-school way, but it's far from the only way. My goal is I just want to get past your knees and I want to keep your shoulders pinned to the mat. If I can do that, where my hands are doesn't really matter that much. So what I've started doing is rather than cross-facing with the near-side and underhooking with the far-side, I now underhook with the near-side and cross-face with the far-side. So almost like I'm kind of putting them in a head and arm triangle, which is very different from what many people do. And you brought up another good example about going for double underhooks when you pass, right? So there's a lot of different ways to do this, and I think we have to, you know, kind of celebrate the fact that everyone's different. People have just different weird body types and attributes and interests. And sometimes people come up with a really cool, novel way to to pass the guard. And man, what I always say is like, look, if you're getting past their knees and you're controlling them the whole way through, and you're keeping their shoulders pinned, and you can secure this thing, then do what works, man. Exactly. Well, and sometimes, you know, I still am very open-minded of like learning new ways of doing things and things like that. And I've had people who've been training less time than me, or maybe they have, you know, we have we get to train with a lot of great wrestlers, right? And the way that they're going to pin someone is very wrestler-like, right? So by just having these discussions, it's like, we can continue growing. And also remembering that, yes, we can do this in so many different ways. Like, are we still, just like you're saying, like, are we still both pinning the shoulders with your near-side underhook and then, you know, going cross-facing with the far arm? Different, but if you're still pinning the shoulders and still having success there, like, okay, great, we're doing the thing, right? Like we're succeeding there. That's great. Yeah. Now, how does your game here change depending on their body type? So you're trying to pass someone's guard. How does this change for you if they are, say, maybe your size or a little bit smaller versus if they are like significantly bigger than you, like up several weight classes? I mean, of course, from a competition perspective, this may come up sometimes, but most of the time where I think this comes up for most people is just in the gym, right? We give people all of this advice about how to do Jiu-Jitsu, but we sometimes forget to mention that, hey, like, if you're 120 pounds and they're 250 pounds, there's going to be some things that work and some things that don't. And I'd love to get your perspective on how you change your passing strategies depending on their body type and their dimensions. So this might be kind of a different answer to your question, but actually the way that I prefer it is I like using techniques that is trainable on just about anyone. And obviously, there's a little bit of difference with size disparities and stuff like that. But I would say the biggest thing for me is if I'm going with one of our guys in the room that's 185, let's say, 50 pounds bigger than me or so, I might just have to be a little bit more diligent about my positioning. For example, if I get inside the frames, I will still try to get inside the frames on somebody who's bigger than me, but I am uber focused on where my weight is distributed, right? So I still have, maybe I still, I crash the frames, I'm in chest-to-chest, let's say I have a cross-face, and I'm tracking that underhook. But I know that they're going to try to off-balance me. So my toes are super active, and my underhook hand instead of being glued underneath their arm is caging. I'm caging their hip or their body with my elbow on the mat, but then I'll plant my hand out so that I don't get off-balanced in any direction. But my goal is still going to be the same. It's still going to be getting inside those frames and pinning. And to be completely honest, my passing game doesn't change too much from that person to, you know, our 107-pound teen blue belt kind of thing. It's going to be very similar. Of course, I'm watching my watching how much weight I'm putting on the the smaller person. But I'm just more diligent about my where my weight is distributed if I'm going against somebody that's bigger than me is I would say the biggest thing that changes for me. 100%. I agree with you completely. I try to the best extent I can to choose techniques that are as close to opponent agnostic as possible. I don't know if there really is truly such a thing as a technique that works on everybody, but to the best extent that I can, I try not to relearn Jiu-Jitsu. I would rather learn a few things that I can use in most places, rather than a bunch of things that are special purpose and only work in one or two places. And the big difference when you're fighting a monster is center of gravity. Because a lot of the things that we all poo-poo and say, this is bad Jiu-Jitsu, like trying to bench press a person, that is completely legitimate if you are just that much bigger than them. And to me, this especially against bigger people, this is like the number one way that they sweep me, right? Is if I'm in half-guard and I put just too much of my weight on top of them, or if they're able to trap my arm while I'm going for an underhook and now I can't get it out, if they've got a sufficient body weight advantage, sometimes they can just roll and I have to go with them and there's nothing I can do about it. So this all comes down to center of gravity. And the advice I normally have for smaller people is if you are against someone who is much, much bigger, just be very careful that however you place your weight on top of them, you never give them control of your center of gravity because that's where things like the the bench press and the, you know, the barrel roll and all of that that big person stuff comes into play. It is very effective for all of the crap that it gets in Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, if you have the attributes to do those moves, do them, right? They they absolutely work. But for the smaller folks among us, we just have to make sure that we don't make that too easy for bigger people by dropping our center of gravity on them. So again, where this comes up in the context of half-guard is if you've got a knee frame in the way, and I kind of lean on top of that, I got to be real careful. Yes, I can float, but really the whole game of a float pass is I'm trying to change the angle so that you can no longer really control my center of gravity. I'm basically just fatiguing your legs. If you lean on top of a heavy person and you let them get your center of gravity so they can tip you one way or the other, that's going to be a problem. And often you can kind of fix this by just being a little bit off to the side and never directly over top of them. Absolutely. And that's actually, you know, a great reason why I love the like outside passing, weave passing, you know, things like that, because, you know, you're not sitting right on people's frames. The thing that I also like about half-guard is like, if we're talking mount, right? Oh my gosh, I will not mount somebody that's significantly bigger than me because just like you're saying, like, and not a problem, but like, if they're just able to like, you know, bench press you off or maybe they do a legit like sit-up escape, right? Once they get that frame in there, it's like, oh, you feel like a small child, you're getting launched off. With half-guard, the thing that I like is you're almost already off to the side a little bit. So you just have to keep your your yourself off to the side until you're inside the frames. And then once you're inside the frames, I almost think about it like, um, you've seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, like a giant pancake. You have to have your hands and your feet kind of ready to brace, you know, if your partner is going to try a big movement like off-balancing you. And then remembering that if, you know, they start to do a big bridge or something like that, if I'm in really good position and in good chest-to-chest position, sometimes that just allows me to pull my foot out. And then I'm going to stay in positions like side control, north-south, you know, to the back. I'm not really going to enter into mount with somebody who's significantly bigger than me because just like you said, then your whole center of gravity is right over them. Very easy to get kind of just launched off essentially. Yeah. I got to ask. I mean, of course, when you're in someone's half-guard, you got a few options. You can you can camp and hang out there. You can pass around the outside, around the legs. You can pass through the inside, between the legs. Or you can just straight up submit the person. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Um, this is something that I feel like we're always in such a rush to talk about passing that sometimes we don't talk about the very valid submission options that you have when you are in someone else's half-guard. But of course, it is a bit tricky because they do still have weapons at their disposal that they can use to counter. So it's it's maybe a little bit harder to get a quality submission there than in a different position. But I would love to know your thoughts on this. Are there any subs or submission strategies that you use when you're in half-guard? You know, I don't attack too many submissions from half-guard. I would say until I get something like the shoulders pinned. So I would say if I'm going to go for anything, a head and arm is fantastic, right? Especially if they do a little too much reaching their arm over towards their head and you can kind of just put your head down on the mat as a wedge, and then you've got kind of like a head and arm triangle. I'm usually more of position first and playing with fire a little bit when you're still in somebody's guard is definitely something I'm just like a little wary of, especially when you you have, you know, you have so many good grapplers out there and still being on the competition scene at this point, just trying to uh give myself the highest percentage finish or position I can. I usually try to pass before I'm looking for a submission. However, end of the match or end of the round, maybe in the room. Now there's obviously some leg locks you can even look at, you know, giving up position potentially maybe, but also maybe getting um a submission out of it. Or again, if I crash those frames and I can find a head and arm choke. I'm not opposed, but ideally, I'm usually pinning the shoulders before I look for anything. Yeah, I think where a lot of people lose submissions from positions like half-guard is where they see something that on the surface looks like a submission, but the person's shoulders aren't pinned and they aren't contained or controlled. And so when you go for it, you just get swept or something else happens to you. I agree with you that really the time to submit is if you've got that person pinned and they are as helpless as they would be if you had them in side control. If they're still actively fighting and trying to sweep you, it's probably not time to try to finish that submission. I mean, that that said, there are people out there who do this. I mean, one of our sponsored athletes, Amanda Bruce, I watched one of her competition finishes recently and she just straight up dog-barred someone from top half-guard, which is not my A-game. It's not a move that I do, but I mean, these things do exist. The one thing that I would suggest to people is you don't necessarily need to finish a submission from top half-guard, but sometimes having legitimate threats can distract people from the pass, and sometimes the pass can distract people from the actual submission. So, in many situations, if you're trying to pass someone's half-guard and you're just really struggling with it, if you switch to a submission attempt, even if it's not the best in the world, or even if you're not really seriously thinking you're going to get it, if it forces a response from the person, it can then open them up in a way that makes the pass easier. So, a common example is if I am trying to pass someone's half-guard and they've just got my leg clamped and I just can't get it free, I will look for things like Ezekiel chokes because even if I don't get it, it forces their hands into a position where they can't really defend anything else. And that makes it easier then for me to start freeing my leg and and passing. So, you know, the old saying in MMA is that you strike to submit and you submit to strike or strike to pass, pass to strike, something like that. But the idea being, don't just commit to one aspect of the game. If you get stuck and you can't advance positionally, you can kind of deceive your opponent a little bit by throwing in a submission there, and that kind of makes them think, oh, I got to defend this now, and then that opens things up. Um, a great example that I found is if you can threaten a guillotine on someone as you pass their half-guard, usually their whole half-guard game just completely falls apart because it's so hard to positionally advance or even maintain position if the other person has you in it some sort of guillotine, even if it's not the greatest. So, what I often do is if the person is bringing their head in too close to me, and this often happens if they're like a leg locker and they want to get underneath me, I will just threaten a guillotine because that basically occupies the entire top half of their body while I then go and finish the pass. That's a great point. And especially because if you are attacking, and not only does their mind go there, but usually like to your point of going for a guillotine, right? If you start to get from that chin strap there and their hands go up to fight that, well, now you might have openings on the arms where you can start to flatten and pin them off of it even, right? So, that's a great point. What is your thought on a, I guess we could call it modern alternative passing option? So, you know, going for things like bolos or crab rides or any kind of other alternative way to advance position. Are you a fan of those techniques? I think anything that's again, kind of like the paths of success are so different these days and there's so many different avenues to go down. Absolutely. And even like, I wish, I wish I could be one of the people that will backflip over somebody's guard, you know, things like that even to change up the angles and, you know, kind of just to get things going. But any of the crab ride stuff, I'm definitely trying to work on getting outside the hips a little bit more and looking at some of those types of passing a little bit more, but it's still new to me. I personally am not athletic enough to pull that stuff off. That's probably an excuse. I could probably do it if I wasn't so lazy. But there's no denying that for someone who's good at that stuff, it works. And the more different options you can throw at your opponent, the more you can keep them guessing, the greater a chance you have of sort of mentally overwhelming them. Man, when people do this to me, it is always so disorienting. You know, I think that I'm defending from half-guard and I'm trying to block the pass or something to that effect, and then all of a sudden, next thing I know, they're on my back, right? It's just an option that I was so busy with something else, I didn't even consider. So, again, like with anything, the more options you have to throw at your opponent, I think the better your odds of success because it makes them think more, and that's going to make them slower. Right. And just like kind of talking about earlier, we were talking about if you start using motion, right, to kind of get your partner moving, and if I'm moving around the perimeter on a seated guard player, right? And because they're now following me, now I can crash in into the frames and everything like that. Same kind of thing, whereas if we have them thinking about like, oh no, is it going to be the submission? You know, are they going to be coming for a guillotine from the pass? Oh, are they going to pass? Oh, are they going to back take? That constant just of like, not only just movement-wise, they're thinking all over the place, but also just keeping their mind occupied of like, oh my gosh, I don't know what's next. And that kind of overwhelming of your partner is definitely going to make it easier to succeed in one of these avenues, right? Yeah, absolutely. I would also love to ask, Mo, maybe before we tie this up, um, as someone who does a lot of high-level competition, and of course, you're one of the, you know, the the top female athletes out there. I'd love to know what observations you have about the half-guard passing game that you're seeing, not just from yourself, but also from the the kind of people that you're having to tape study and you're you're having to compete against. What does good half-guard passing look like in the current meta as of this recording? You know, I think one of the biggest things that stands out to me, um, and maybe this is part of my own experiences, uh, kind of leading up to this point is just really good passers, half-guard or otherwise, are able to capitalize on their partner's reaction. Kind of like what we're talking about. You know, you're not married to one pass or one position, right? They see their partner or opponent getting out of position and they capitalize on that. Whether that's a submission, whether that's pinning the upper body because they're able to get inside the frames. You know, it's always the small windows where you see because obviously if you have two people that are going against each other and they're both really high-level athletes, then it's the smallest of windows that you have to capitalize on. So, I feel like a lot of it is just taking the opportunity when they can get it, but being a little reaction-based and mostly right now, I'd say most of my study is is off of like no-gi games. So, I don't know if I'd feel differently if I watched some more gi passing of of late, but yeah, as far as high-level passing and half-guard passing right now, it feels like it's very much like reading the partner's reaction or maybe even feeling the partner's reaction to be able to make the best decision given the circumstance. Great illustration there. I remember back when he was an an active fighter, George St-Pierre, I remember one time his corner was yelling at him, be reactive, be reactive, or something like that. And I remember at the time thinking that sounded like really odd advice because, you know, in Jiu-Jitsu, we always tell people, you want to be proactive, you want to dictate the pace and manage the tempo, and you know, you never want to cede that to your opponent. So, why is one of the best in the world being told by one of the best coaches in the world that he needs to be reactive? And what I realized was he means reactive in a different way than maybe I do. He's not, you know, ceding the pace or anything like that. In this context, reactive just means I'm not married to any one particular thing that I want to do. I will respond to the energy that my opponent gives me without hesitation. Like I'm still being proactive, but just rather than trying to force something that isn't there, I'm open-minded based on the energy that my opponent is giving me. And as soon as they give me an opening, I will immediately react to that and take advantage. So, that's kind of how I squared that away. I would be I'd love to know your thoughts on this too because this is a thing we always hear about in Jiu-Jitsu, the importance of, you know, controlling the pace. And how does that balance with this whole problem of being active versus reactive to someone's guard? Yeah, I think one of the things is you still need to be a threat, right? So it's not just that you're not um countering essentially, right? You're in there, you're in these positions, you're putting pressure on and so we're still to some degree dictating some of the match, right? It's not that we're sitting back and we're waiting to see what's going to happen to us. We still have intention of moving forward, but it's about not getting too narrow-minded, right? Where we miss some of the obvious things. And I think part of that is even like a degree of being present, right? When we're training or when we're competing to be like, okay, we especially as you get more experience, we can feel reactions from people. And part of that is just, you know, you get those reps in the training room, you know, you do a lot of positional rounds. And there's going to be these avenues that start to come out, right? You know like as soon as the person pushes back in in this way, you know, now you crash. Okay, person pushes back in a different way. Okay, now you're going around. And so we're still moving forward, we still have intention, but we're not too narrow-minded where we have to get this one thing. And if you have somebody who shuts down that one thing, then you're like, well, now what, right? It has to be this like, okay, maybe we're even pushing for a certain reaction, but if they give us something different, like, okay, I know enough, I've been here before. I've let my body kind of do the work and I've experienced this position enough that I'm now able to move with that, right? So still moving forward with intention, I think that's still very important. You're not like back on your heels waiting like, okay, what are they going to do? But as we start to pressure, as we're moving forward and into these places that we like to be, right? I kind of refer to them as like, for some of our athletes at our gym is like, finding these places, find your happy places. So, I'm going to have a lot of intention of getting into, let's say half-guard. I'm forcing half-guard, right? Whether they want to be there or not, I'm forcing half-guard. So I've done that. I had intention. I'm moving forward. But then I'm going to play in there and I'm going to let them, I'm going to kind of see what their reaction is. I'm driving, I'm driving. Okay, now they've opened up that that space to crash those frames. Okay, I'm going to go chest-to-chest here because to not take that, to not be able to react to that and force something else would be silly. And then maybe I miss a really good opportunity. Amazing, Mo. Well, fantastic chat. Anything else on this topic that you wanted to discuss here or did we cover everything? I think we pretty much covered everything. I love passing, I love half-guard. I really tried to whittle it down to something that made sense in an hour. So hopefully I did a good job of that and hopefully this is uh useful for some people that are listening. Well, I think it came out great. But the next question then here is if people like this approach, if they think that your style would resonate with them and if they're in the Colorado area, why don't we tell people, how can they train with you? And also if they want to see your matches and stuff, where can they follow you on social? Yeah, so first, we'd love to have anyone who wants to visit in Colorado Springs, Colorado. My gym is Tabula Rasa or Tabs Jiu-Jitsu. And you can find me on Instagram at mo.jiujitsu. And um, yeah, I'd love to meet or train with anybody who's interested in coming through. We love having visitors. Amazing. Well, I will put those links in the show notes, like I mentioned earlier. We've got a lot of mutuals, a lot of our community members train in your gym and speak incredibly highly of the coaching there. So I definitely recommend if people are in the Colorado area, check it out. You guys have quite the Jiu-Jitsu scene over there. I have been thinking I might have to arrange some sort of Jiu-Jitsu sabbatical to Colorado because there are so many gyms in our community who are kind of popping up there and it it sounds like you guys really have something going on. Oh my gosh, yes, it's crazy to see because I've been here, I grew up here. So getting to see how much growth has happened in the last like decade even has been amazing. I obviously am biased, but Steve, you should really come out. It's really awesome. My cardio's already bad enough though. At that kind of altitude, I might just die. But you know what, we could give it a try at some point. But I will go ahead and put those links in the show notes. I'll also put a link to everything we make. It's all at BJJ Mental Models.com, so pretty easy to find. I always tell people the episodes of this podcast, they're intended to be things that you can learn from at any time. Many people go back even to episode one and listen from there. I mean, we don't talk a lot about current events or or news or anything like that. So you don't have to worry about the content going stale or out of date. Of course, we've also started publishing mini episodes on our feed as well. So if you are new to BJJ Mental Models and you understandably don't want to spend 400 hours of your life listening to me talk from episode one through to today. There's a a quicker way to kind of get up to speed on some of the big ideas that we talk about. Just grab the mini episodes from our feed. And of course, all of this is powered by BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is um our subscription service and I think I can safely say now is one of the biggest and uh most popular in the world when it comes to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu online services. What we do is completely different from everyone else. Rather than just covering video instructional, we also have the world's largest library of audio style courses on Jiu-Jitsu strategy, concepts, tactics, philosophy, very different approach from the more technique-based approaches that you'll see on most of the video sites. We also do have a video site though. So if you sign up, you do get that as well. There's a ton of freebies and perks. The community alone is probably worth the membership and there's a free trial. So if you haven't already checked it out, I would ask that you please do consider doing so. Go to BJJ Mental Models.com for premium and also all of our other free stuff as well. And again, I'll put a link in the show notes. But Mo, thanks so much. I'm so glad we got a chance to do this. An always relevant topic, something that is just fundamental to everyone's Jiu-Jitsu and still somehow not discussed in enough detail. And I can't think of anyone I'd rather have this conversation with than you. So thank you so much for coming by and doing this. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it, Steve. Most welcome. Thank you to the listeners as well. Appreciate you too and we will talk to you next week. See you then.