Mini Ep. 105: Double Trouble

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 everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And this mini episode is going to spend a few minutes recapping a really important concept in jiu-jitsu. If you study John Danaher, you might have heard about this before. It's called double trouble. So, do you want me to talk Danaher to you? Let's do it. Now, I'm sure John Danaher was probably not the original innovator of this concept. But when we talk about double trouble, we normally credit John as being the person who made this idea famous. It comes up a lot in leg entanglements and leg submissions, but it applies to any situation in jiu-jitsu where you are trying to control somebody by their arms or legs. Double trouble tells us that to fully control a near-side limb, we also have to control a far-side limb. The most obvious example, again, going back to Danaher, is with leg locks. You will see John show examples of controlling a far-side leg in order to attack a near-side leg, or switching from attacking a near-side leg to attacking the far-side leg. And I should clarify, when we say near-side, I mean whichever leg is closer to you. When I say far-side, I mean whichever leg is further away from you. This is a very dynamic way of describing things. It changes depending on the position, but hopefully you get the idea. Let's talk about why this is important. What this really means is if you want to fully control someone's limb, you have to also fully control a limb on the opposite side. So let's go to leg locks and talk about why this matters here, because again, this is Danaher's example and we'll expand upon that past that. If I want to ankle lock you, straight ankle lock you, probably I've got my body wrapped around one of your legs. If I can get finishing power, I can probably get the submission. But if you are early in your defense, you have a lot of options to defend an ankle lock. You could put on the boot, base on that foot, you could try to hide your heel, you can rotate your body. There are many ways to defend a leg lock. One of the late stage escapes for a limb submission like a leg lock is to rotate your body. I would prefer an early stage defense, which means I never let you control my leg in the first place. Or if you do get my leg, I prevent you from controlling two of the three joints, specifically the knee joint. If you are trying to leg lock me and I can prevent you from controlling my knee, I can probably prevent you from finishing me. But let's say that you've got control of my ankle, you've got control of my knee. How can I defend now? It's going to be pretty hard. I still have one option. I can use the third joint in my leg, which is my hip joint. And that means I can rotate. I can try to roll out of the leg lock. I can change the angle of my body. And by doing that, I might be able to render the leg lock obsolete. Now, you can still submit a person if they roll when you try to leg lock them. You can follow them. But I would prefer to not have to do that. I would prefer to keep you completely controlled and finished from there. If someone is trying to roll out of a leg lock or an arm lock as well, and this does come up, what that means is that I have failed to control the third joint, the joint that is attached to the torso. So that would be the hip or the shoulder. If the person is able to roll out of my leg lock, that means that I don't have control of the hip. Controlling the hip is not easy. There's not a handle that you can use to just grab someone's hip and keep it in place, like there is with the ankle or the knee. So how do you control someone's hip? Well, the answer is you prevent them from rotating. You do this by controlling the far-side limb. If I am trying to ankle lock your near-side leg, should I want to prevent you from rotating, I do so by also controlling your far-side leg. So you will see leg lockers do this, where in addition to trying to control the obvious leg that they're attacking, they will also try to control the other leg at the same time. The primary benefit from doing this is if I control both of your legs, you can't rotate anymore. It's as if I was controlling your hip. I have taken away that ability. And that allows me to set up the leg lock in a way that I can finish from. Now, I may choose to let go of that second leg when I go for the finish, but as I am securing control and trying to shut you down, trying to get you into the finishing position, I may hold both your legs so that I can prevent you from doing that late stage escape, which is trying to rotate out. With arm and leg submissions, rotation is usually one of the late stage defenses you'll see. Let's pause the conversation about legs for a second and talk about arms. The hitchhiker escape is a similar example. With legs, a late stage defense might be trying to rotate and roll out of the leg lock. With arms, if I'm trying to armbar you, the hitchhiker escape is similar. It's an example of trying to rotate out of the arm lock. You would do this if your other arm lock defenses have failed. So if my early stage defenses were, don't let you grab my arm, don't let you control my elbow, if those fail, one of my last options may be to rotate my body to render the arm lock useless. That's what the hitchhiker escape is. So if you have two of the three major joints in a limb controlled, in the case of an arm, that would be the wrist and the elbow, that's good control, but it may not be enough to finish because rotation is still an option. And double trouble is how we kill that rotation. So thinking about the armbar again, and this is important because when we talk about double trouble, it usually comes up in the context of leg locks, but it's just as relevant with arm locks. If I want to prevent your late stage rotation escape from an armbar, meaning the hitchhiker escape, the way I do that is by controlling your far shoulder. If I can control your far shoulder, then you can't rotate your torso anymore. And that prevents you from doing things like the hitchhiker escape. This is why when people teach you how to do an arm lock from top side, they will tell you to pinch your feet against the person's far shoulder. And whether you cross your ankles or not is a detail that we can discuss another day. The important thing is you take away space around their shoulder so they can't rotate. That's why we pinch against the far shoulder. It prevents rotation, which holds the person in place so you can finish the arm lock. And the same thing happens with leg locks. If you need to control someone's body so that you can finish a submission on the near-side leg, you may also have to control the far-side leg to prevent rotation. Once you start thinking about this idea of double trouble, you will see it all over the place in jiu-jitsu. The most obvious examples are the ones I already provided, where you are trying to finish a leg lock and you want to prevent your opponent from rolling out of it, so you control the far leg. Or maybe you're trying to finish an armbar and you'd want to prevent the hitchhiker escape, so you control the far shoulder. But there are other stranger examples too. The omoplata is an example of where far-side shoulder control can prevent your opponent from escaping. Same with the Kimura. With the Kimura, especially on top, you are using the ground as a wedge so that your opponent cannot roll on the free shoulder. The bow and arrow choke is an interesting example. To do a bow and arrow choke successfully, you'll want control over something on the near-side and something on the far-side to prevent rotation. One of the common escapes from the bow and arrow choke is to rotate your body into the choke to take out the tension. And if you want to shut someone down so they can't do this, the easiest way is you control one of their legs and one of their arms, but on different sides of the body. So when we think of that bow and arrow, often we are grabbing the near-side leg while controlling their far-side arm. This example of double trouble comes up all over in jiu-jitsu. And if I were to summarize this simply, I would say, if you want to shut down late stage defenses, especially on arm and leg attacks, your last step in control is to secure their hip or their shoulder. And you do that by using double trouble, by controlling a limb on the near-side and the far-side. Doing this prevents them from being able to rotate, which is one of the late stage defenses that you see. This is a really cool idea. We talk about this kind of stuff frequently on BJJ Mental Models. If you don't already, I would suggest you hit up BJJmentalmodels.com and check out our full-length podcast episodes, plus more mini episodes like this, and consider signing up for our free newsletter. All of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. And if you would like to level up with us, please check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is the world's largest and most comprehensive audio library of jiu-jitsu master classes. Your first week is free. That is also at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thank you for listening and we will talk to you soon.