Mini Ep. 40: Placeholders

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 introduce a simple but very important concept for advancing position in Jiu-Jitsu. I've heard this explained as the concept of placeholders. That's terminology that I've taken from Rob Bernacki at Island's Top Team. I think it's a really good way to explain this. The idea is, as we are advancing position, we are going to have to use our hands, our feet, other parts of our body to secure our opponent so we can advance position. And we want to make sure that we never abandon one point of control until we've replaced it with another point of control. Let's give a real-world parallel. If you're trying to climb a ladder, you're going to be doing it one hand at a time. You reach and you grab a rung with your left hand, and then you reach a bit higher and you grab a rung with your right hand. Now, both your hands are occupied, so to keep going up, you've got to let go of something. So, with your left hand, you're going to let go and you're going to reach up and grab one rung higher. Basically, you're climbing that ladder one rung at a time. The important thing, though, is to make sure that your hands are always connected to the ladder. If you were to release both hands at the same time in the hope of climbing faster, you would wind up falling off the ladder. You always need to be connected to the ladder somehow. So, in effect, you always have a placeholder grip on the ladder. You are always grabbing with one hand and then climbing with the other, and then advancing in that manner until you get to the top. Advancing position in Jiu-Jitsu works very similar to that example of climbing a ladder. We always want to make sure that as we are advancing position, we never release a point of control until we've replaced it with something equivalent or better. In fact, while we're talking about this analogy of climbing a ladder, Christian Woodmansee from Logic BJJ talks about this quite a bit. He has a ladder concept for guard passing where he describes the act of passing the guard like climbing a ladder. You start with the ankles and then you go to the knees and then you go to the hips and then to the torso, and eventually, depending on what you're trying to do, you might be trying to make it up and cross-face them. So, you're climbing their body like a ladder. But the important thing is, as we attempt to advance position and pass the guard, we never want to get so excited that we let go of all of our points of control because that would allow our opponent to escape, to re-guard, to move. And you see this a lot with guard passers who are in a big rush. Often, they want to pass the guard with speed, and so they will think they've cleared the person's legs, and maybe they have, and they will let go of their grips and try to speed into a pin. But in that moment where they've let go of the person's legs, if they have not secured an equivalent or better grip, the guard player has the opportunity to retain because there's nothing preventing them from trying to move into a guard retention position. If you had kept your points of control, you might be able to prevent them from doing that. So, let's give a very specific example. Let's talk about a knee-cut pass. I love using the knee-cut pass as an example because it's so obvious and simple and easily understood. When you are knee-cutting through someone's guard, a common mistake that beginners especially make is they will get the knee-cut motion and then they will speed right to side control or even to north-south without any equivalent points of control. And in that scramble, because there's nothing holding their opponent in place, the opponent can re-guard or turtle or wrestle up or do something like that. So, you want to prevent them from doing that. That's why when you knee-cut pass someone, one of the most important things to understand is before you free your leg, before you get the the knee doing the knee-cut out of their guard, you need to have points of control on the top of their body. So, what you're trying to do is you're trying to keep your opponent pinned shoulders to the floor while you complete the knee-cut pass. There's a few ways you can do this. You can underhook the far arm. That keeps them pinned in position. In the gi, you can pull up on the near-side arm. That makes it hard for them to turn onto their side towards you. There's a lot of ways that you can keep the person with their shoulders pinned onto the mat. But the important thing is you find a way to do that. If you don't, and you just let your knee escape their guard, if you have no other points of control, they will wrestle up, single you, or get to your back. And this is a common lesson that applies not just to the knee-cut pass, but really to any situation where you're trying to advance position. As you are moving up the positional hierarchy, never get so excited that you let go of your grips and try to speed to the next position. Before you let something go, you need to make sure that you always have something better. That's why when someone is passing the guard, you will see that before they try to really solidify the guard pass, they will often again go for an underhook, try to pin the person's head to the ground with a cross-face, keep their shoulders onto the mat. That allows them to escape their leg from the other person's guard without having to worry about that person then turtling or re-guarding or something like that. So, this is a concept that applies throughout all of Jiu-Jitsu. Again, think of it like a ladder. With a ladder, you never want to let go of both rungs at the same time. Every time you reach up to grab one rung higher, you must at least keep your other hand on a rung so that you don't fall off the ladder. The same thing applies when you're advancing position. So, there you go, placeholders. It's a pretty simple concept, but it's very powerful, and hopefully this gives you some insight into how to advance position in Jiu-Jitsu more safely without risking losing the entire thing. Climb that ladder one rung at a time, never let go of both rungs at once. If you want more like this, everything we make lives at BJJ Mental Models. You can get it all at BJJmentalmodels.com. That's where we've got our podcast, our mini episodes like this, our newsletter, all of which are completely free. And if you want to really level up your Jiu-Jitsu game, BJJ Mental Models Premium is how you do that. It is the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses on strategy, tactics, mindset, concepts. Definitely recommend checking that out, and there are a ton of other reasons why you'd want to go premium as well. All of that info is on our website. I'll put a link in the show notes, but you can grab it all at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks again for hanging out here with me today, and we'll talk to you soon.