Ep. 361: Submission Series: The Kimura, feat. Stephan Kesting

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models Premium community member has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models Premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models Episode 361. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm here today with friend of the podcast, multi-time returning guest, and in my opinion, the arguable goat of Jiu-Jitsu digital instructionals. We got Stephen Kesting on the line. How's it going, my friend? Speaker 2: It's going very well. Thank you so much for having me back, Steve. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. Speaker 1: Well, people probably know if they listen to us on other feeds, you and I talk a lot about a lot of different stuff. But one thing that shocks me that we've never discussed is the Kimura. Now, you had mentioned that you've got some upcoming content and material on this, and I thought, you know what? Would love to have Stephen on, but I'm sure we've talked about this at some point, but man, I looked through the feed, I don't think we've ever really done a dedicated episode on the Kimura. We've danced around it here and there. We I think we've talked about the Kimura trap. We've talked about submission as position, using the Kimura on the premium feed, but we've never really had a dedicated episode on the Kimura. So if this is something that you have been exploring recently, I want to get into it with you. Maybe first outline to me the case for the Kimura. How did you come about landing on putting this material together and what's kind of your unique take on the Kimura that other people might not be familiar with yet? Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting when we're talking about the Kimura. It really is one of the oldest submissions in the world. I mean, there are literal soapstone carvings from 3,000 years ago of two wrestlers going at it and putting essentially Kimuras on each other. And there are Kimura carvings in Indian temples and I'm sure on Greek vases and English catch wrestling and Japanese Jiu-Jitsu. It's just there's a fundamental way to manipulate the human body that's essentially, to put it very crudely, putting one guy's hand behind his back and forcing his hand up towards his head, either to control him or to get him to submit or to break an arm. And we've seen all three. We've seen all three. We've seen arm breaks happen. I mean, Nogueira versus I believe it was Frank Mir in the UFC was the first one that people became aware of. Nogueira had his arm broken from the top of side control when Frank Mir on the bottom of side control torqued the arm and snapped the humerus. So that's an example of Kimura as match-ending submission. Kimura as control, this happens all the time. You see it in a lot of the older, say even catch wrestling, they weren't so much going for submission, they were using the submissions to set up the pins. But again, giving somebody the choice between I am going to rip your arm off or you can roll and put your shoulders on the ground and get pinned, most people will roll and put their shoulders on the ground and get pinned. In terms of its importance today with the resurgence of no-gi grappling, or with the surgence, not the resurgence, with the surgence, if that's a word, of no-gi grappling, handles are far and few between. I think you can get away with never doing a Kimura if you're training in the gi. You should learn how to do a Kimura if you're training in the gi, but it's kind of optional. I don't think it's optional in no-gi, just because it's so hard to control your opponent that if you manage to lock on a Kimura, it's a great big handle. And to answer your question, how did I come across this? And I tend to direct my training in six-month to 12-month blocks, and I tend to focus on specific areas because at least I don't think that's how beginners should train. Beginners need to train more broadly. They don't have the luxury of spending 12 months diving into the scissor sweep or whatever. But I do, because I've been doing this for 30 years, give or take. So it amuses me to go really deep into a position, whether that's the single leg X-guard, the omoplata, leg locks. And for the last, I want to say, nine months, it's been the Kimura. It's been the main thing that I've been going for in my sparring. It's been the main thing I've been drilling about. It's been the main thing I've been sort of situationally exploring with my training partners. Hey, if I have you in this, what are you going to do? All right, now let's add a little bit of resistance and doing a lot of these specific sparring drills. I guess the modern word for it is games, but specific sparring drills that really are necessary to develop a Kimura to a high degree. Speaker 1: I love that you brought up the the history of the Kimura. Many people who have exclusively trained Jiu-Jitsu and lived within that ecosystem might be under the impression that, you know, the Kimura was invented in the 20th century when Helio Gracie let Masahiko Kimura put him in a Kimura and then he refused to tap and won a moral victory and all of that, right? But the the history of this move goes well beyond just the the nicknaming of the move after Masahiko Kimura from that famous fight with Helio Gracie. I mean, the catch wrestlers for ages have referred to the Kimura as the double wrist lock. And you bring up that this is not unique to just our fighting system or catch wrestling. It is a submission that has been used for a very, very, very long time. It's just such a powerful way to control someone, to twist their arm behind their back. And of course, there's many moves that take advantage of this like the omoplata, but the omoplata, I think, tends to be a bit more complicated and a little bit less intuitive, especially for beginners. The Kimura is a tremendously intuitive move in terms of how it works. But, as you brought up, it's not always actually as easy to to finish as people might think, especially with the gi being the way that many of us, us older folks kind of came up in training. In the gi, it's a lot easier to shut down the actual finish from the Kimura because you can grab fabric. But that doesn't mean it's bad or it's ineffective. It's just something that people can do to stall you out or to defend. In no-gi, though, it's going to be much harder to do that. And especially given that matches get more slippery the longer they go, it's going to get easier and easier to eventually get that arm free if you get deeper into the fight, which is a a cool thing about the Kimura. It's kind of different from a lot of other submissions like armbars, which get harder to do as the fight goes on. Speaker 2: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. I mean, for years and years, I thought of the Kimura as a move. But you got to start thinking about these things in terms of systems or positional systems. I'll give you an example. I guess one of my claims to fame is I released a roadmap for BJJ. It's around, you can sign up for it, you can download it for free on my site, grapplearts.com/book, if I recall correctly. And basically, this was the idea that, yeah, Jiu-Jitsu is a bunch of moves, but that's really hard to keep in mind. Really, it's a system of positions. Classical Jiu-Jitsu is some combination of some number of positions, and the way I define it, that would be in the guard or using the guard, in side control or being on the bottom of side control, in knee mount, on the bottom of knee mount, in mount or the bottom of mount, on the back, on the wrong side of the back, somebody has your back, on the top of turtle or on the bottom of turtle. And that doesn't explain every position in Jiu-Jitsu, but it explains 80% of them. If you go and to any open mat in the world right now, and you watch, 80 or 90% of the action you see is going to be in one of those positions. Then the same realization came along for leg locks, right? At first, we all learned leg locks, here's an ankle lock, here's a heel hook, here's a toe hold. But really the important thing of getting leg locks to click, especially in the modern era, where they are a very high percentage submission, was approaching it as a positional game as well. Yeah, the finishes are all cool, but really what's the secret sauce? The secret sauce is understanding that there are positions like standard ashi, like double outside ashi, like 50/50, like the 411, like the backside 50/50, like the butterfly ashi. And now you're trading positions and the battle, the fundamental battle becomes to control get to a dominant position, a more dominant position than your opponent, and to stop him from escaping, and then you can work towards the actual finish. Or you don't you could train leg locks all day long and never actually finish a heel hook if you wanted to, because you'd just be battling to get into the position and stopping your opponent from getting out of that position. So people say the Kimura is a position. Well, I would say the Kimura is a system, really. And it's a system where most of the time you're going to be in a number of recognizable positions. Can I go through what I think the main ones are? Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 2: Yeah, the Kimura from side control, right? We're cross chest to each other and that is that's a super basic one. But if you keep that grip and you circle towards your opponent's head and you end up straddling their face and you pull them up on their side, that's politely referred to as the north-south Kimura. I call it the teabag Kimura. It's it's a very powerful version and if I had the choice, and if I was going against a strong guy, that is the position I'd probably want to finish it from. If I keep on circling, if I keep the exact same grip and I essentially dismount his head, now I end up in the near side Kimura. And I think this is probably the most important position that people don't train enough. A lot of people don't even know it exists. I put a video out about this on YouTube. I want to say five years ago. If you search Stephen Kesting near side Kimura, you'll find it somewhere on YouTube. And it's an incredibly important position, not because it's a super powerful finishing position, but it sets up taking the back, it sets up the armbar, and it sets up the teabag and it's a way to control your opponent in the scramble. The other positions are the top half from top of half guard. You can use the Kimura to submit. You can use the Kimura to pass the guard. The Kimura from the bottom of half guard. The Kimura from back control, which is incredibly important, especially in no-gi, because I'm assuming your listeners are familiar with the terms weak side and strong side. But if you're on my back and you've got your right arm going over my shoulder and your left arm going under my shoulder and your hands connected in the middle of my chest, in general, the way it used to be is I would want to you from an attacking point of view, would want us to be on the right side, the so-called strong side. But in the last 10 years, this amazing technology has developed about controlling and attacking from the weak side, which is if we fall to the word is the underhook side. And the central thing there, the central theme there, the concept that you have to do is don't allow your opponent to put his head on the ground. If you allow your opponent to put his head on the ground, and then he can slither a little bit and put his shoulders on the ground and then slither a bit and put his hips on the ground, he's going to be escaping and at best you might get top half. So to keep your opponent's head off the ground, you could use your own head and jam it in there, but it's so much better to throw a Kimura on that bottom arm because now you've created a frame. The guy's head is basically being held up by the bones of your it's resting on your upper arm, but it's your your forearm bone. It's making a frame right to the floor. Other positions is the T-Kimura. So that's if you keep that same grip, but you end up your opponent's on his back facing the ceiling and you're kind of lying perpendicular to him. You're forming a T with his head on your belly. And there are a whole lot of variations of that, but we're just looking at the big picture. The closed guard Kimura, which I think is overrated and probably shouldn't be taught in day one beginner class. And there's the whole Kimura-based passing, which has become a bit of a meta now. Then there's using the Kimura to control your opponent when he's in turtle, both Kimura his far arm on the far side of his body and the near arm. You don't typically start out with the near arm grip, but you end up there a fair bit if you're scrambling. And then there's the whole standing Kimura game. And the cool thing is, if you start in any one of these positions, I'm trying to get the Kimura on you when I'm in top half guard and I lock that arm on. I lock the arms in place. Now as we're rolling, I don't manage to finish it, but I could end up rolling to the T-Kimura. From the T-Kimura, you could come up to my knees and go to the near side Kimura. From the near side Kimura, I could end up in the teabag position, but you escape again and you somehow roll me. Now I'm applying the Kimura from the bottom of half guard. If things go really poorly, I'm applying it from the bottom of side control, which I consider a subsection of half guard because or I consider bottom side control and bottom half guard essentially the same thing if you've got a Kimura locked on. Obviously, it's better to be in half, but so no matter what happens as you keep this Kimura grip and you flow through these positions, there are transitions to the other positions. There are opportunities to finish the Kimura. There's opportunities to finish with many other submissions, everything from the north-south choke to various types of triangle chokes, to straight armbars. Straight armbars and Kimuras go together tremendously well. And so it begins to look a lot like that positional-based game that we that revolutionized leg locks, or that positional-based game that helped so many people understand what the hell's going on with Jiu-Jitsu. It looks just like a couple of bodies rolling around, but once you identify those central positions, it starts making a lot more sense. Speaker 1: Yeah, and you didn't even talk about one of my favorite sneaky things, which is the bottom turtle Kimura. I do this sometimes as an alternative to a Peterson roll. I find sometimes with the the Peterson roll, where, you know, the person tries to go for a seatbelt and you trap their arm and then you roll. I find that can be hard against big people or people who have good base. But if you put some twist on their arm like a Kimura, it's way harder for them to deny the roll. So there's a lot of variations of this position. One universal with the Kimura is that when you twist someone's arm behind their back like that or you start to put in that twist, you deny them the ability to use the strong muscles in their arm. And so it gets really hard for them to fight back with muscle and power, even if they're a pretty big guy or girl. And that's kind of interesting because for a long time, the Kimura was looked at as a move for big strong people. And it's only in say the last 10 or so years that the Kimura has evolved into this Kimura trap system. This realization that we don't need to just finish this thing as a submission, but we can use it as a control point for advancement. I often used to think of the Kimura as a sort of a terminal position. Like you get there and it's the end of the chain. You either finish it or you lose it. But the big realization with the Kimura was that it is part of a progressional advancement. It's a system, like you said. You could be standing in someone's guard and by attacking the Kimura, you can use that to get to their back and go, you know, just to advance positions. There's a lot of things that you can do with the Kimura. You can use it to pass half guard. It's a very powerful positional tool. And this whole idea, which you talked about earlier, of thinking of submissions as positions in and of themselves is such an important mental shift. So important actually that we did a whole course about this with our mutual friend Rob Bernacki on BJJ Mental Models Premium, about the idea of submission as position. And one of the submissions that he talked about was the Kimura, arguably the most important submission to play as a position. If you can get it out of your head that, hey, I need to finish this thing right now, and you can look at it as a tool for advancing position, then suddenly it becomes much more viable from positions like, you know, top half guard where it might otherwise be kind of tricky to finish a person. Then it becomes a lot more viable for smaller people as well because you don't have to muscle through it anymore. You're not trying to finish all the time, but you're using it as a way to get behind the person or to advance position up the chain. Speaker 2: And to take one of his arms out of commission. There's a you know, this idea of submission as position. This is true, but it's more true for some submissions than others. I mean, we could consider the rear naked choke a position, but really, it's pretty simple. Like you basically, with a few exceptions, you need to be on the guy's back with one or two hooks in, or the guy really needs to screw up, or, you know, maybe you can apply it from the T-Kimura or the omoplata. But it's not that deep as a positional game. Getting to the back, now that's a deep positional game. And so learning to control say the armbar position and learning to control the triangle position, those are all valid things. But I really think that the Kimura is the most diverse of those submission-based positional controls. And as such, you really need to go through those somewhere in the realm of 10 to 12 to 13 positions. You can fine slice it however you want. I mean, you fine sliced including the bottom turtle. Yeah, I would agree that the bottom turtle is a position. I think it for me, anyhow, it mostly ties into standing up and the whole standing Kimura game. So, you know, and do we separate side control and a Kimura where you're at 45 degrees to your opponent and a Kimura where you're 180 degrees in north-south without the guy being rolled up? We can fine slice all of these if we want. It depends in biology terms, are you a lumper or are you a splitter in terms of saying what a new species is? But there's something like 10 to 12 positions that if you become comfortable with them, then no matter where you are latched onto your opponent's arm. So of all the submissions, I would say that the Kimura is the deepest positionally because you can apply it from on top, you can apply it on bottom, you can apply it from behind, you can apply it when the guy's behind you, you can apply it when your legs are entangled, when they're not, when you're standing and the other guy's on the ground. It's very, very deep, but developing that depth of awareness means that once you start going down that road, an awful lot can happen and your opponent can try an awful lot of different techniques to get out. And, you know, he can spaz out to the left, he can spaz out to the right, he can drive up, he can drive down, and you'll have answers for that because, oh, look, I have the guy in the T-Kimura and he's trying to slither down. Well, that's not good for the T-Kimura, but now I can recover that by going to the near side Kimura. And from there, I know what I can do. Here are my main options. Here are the main positional options. Here are the ways to stay in the Kimura game. Here's the ways to transition to an armbar. Here's how to transition to a a triangle choke. And that's an incredibly reassuring thing because it means that you're going to be in that position less often where you simply don't know what you should be doing next. Speaker 1: Yeah, I like how you brought up that the Kimura is different from a lot of the other submissions because it has so much ability to help you move forward with positional advancement. And the rear naked choke is a great counter example, right? I would say that is pretty close to being a terminal position. It's kind of the end of the sequence. Very rarely do you get to a rear naked choke position and think to yourself, okay, but what I really want to do is like get up on knee on belly. If you get behind someone in a rear naked choking position, you're probably already where you want to be, and they might force you to switch to a different plan if they defend well, but ultimately that's kind of the end of where you were looking to get to. Whereas with a Kimura, you can start the Kimura sequence from almost anywhere and use that to chase the guard pass, to chase to the back. You talked about the Kimura, the guard pass where you kind of hop over the person, you try to get to that T-Kimura on the back. There's so many options that you can do there. There's some submissions that just work better for positional sequencing than others. And of course, you talked about the rear naked choke. I would also say that there are some others like the triangle, which you can and probably should learn how to play them as a position, but they're not as positionally strong as something like the Kimura. When you have someone in a triangle type guard, if they have good posture, you're still at threat even if you're attacking the triangle. You can get stacked, you can get picked up. A lot of stuff can happen there because the person is still facing you mostly square on and they still have the ability to use their muscle and their athleticism. Whereas once you start forcing a Kimura, once you start getting that arm sort of behind the back, you begin forcing a response from your opponent. And now they have to go into reactive mode. And most of the time, if you can get your opponent to go into reactive mode, it's going to work well for you. Another good submission that works like this is the guillotine, right? If you can snatch onto someone's head, regardless of how good you are at guillotines or not, they have to respect that. They have to take that seriously and react and probably bring in their hands to defend. And so you're now forcing them onto the defensive. The Kimura is very much the same, right? Even if the other person is big, strong, has great Kimura defense, just by trying to go for it, you force them to react and respond, and that can open up a lot of possibilities that might not have been there before. Speaker 2: Yeah, and it gives you strategic options if you're competing because let's say you're competing and let's say you catch a Kimura, but you're behind on points. Well, maybe your goal here would be to use a Kimura as a handle to sweep your opponent or as a handle to advance your position, to take the back, at least equal up the points. But now, in a different scenario, you're competing and you've got 30 seconds left. Now it becomes a time to use that as a finishing tool. So having those options, or if we want to go self-defense, I'll go self-defense. If you want to use a Kimura, yeah, you could use it to break somebody's arm and put them out of commission, or you could use it to hold somebody there for a very long time, not using that much energy and keep yourself fairly safe while you're waiting for help to arrive. So you have options and having options is usually a good thing. Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, part of the challenge with the Kimura where people hit kind of a mental block is they get to a position where they've probably been taught the Kimura, like you brought up closed guard, for example. It's really hard to finish a Kimura from closed guard. I mean, I can't even think of, man, I may have never actually finished a Kimura on someone who was resisting from closed guard. And similarly, even from top side half guard, it can be difficult, especially in the gi, to try to finish from there because people will just grab their belt or their pants. And now it turns into a game of muscle. Can I break their grip? So a lot of people here, they get to those situations and they get discouraged and they think, ah, the Kimura just doesn't work for me. And again, I mean, there were people for a long time who referred to the Kimura as a big guy position. The idea was you had to have enough strength to pull the arm free if you wanted to make that work. But getting away from that and realizing that, hey, while this person is forced to defend the Kimura and while they're occupied there, I can move the rest of my body, right? They're still trying to defend this submission. One of two things is going to happen here. Either they're going to have to roll to release the pressure if you're able to get enough torque on it, or even if you can't do that, even if you can't get enough torque on it, by forcing them to defend, like you said, you've taken one of their arms out of the game. You've taken it out of alignment and you're forcing them to move. Often, to release the pressure or to protect themselves, they're going to have to rotate their body or change their angle. And that can open up space for you to do things like complete the guard pass, get to the T-Kimura, which is a great position to be in, get all the way to their back. All of that happens even if they're desperately grabbing onto their belt or their fabric and you can't wrench the arm free. Just the presence of the threat forces them often to move and it makes space. So this is a great way to pass the guard. I mean, if if you can get a Kimura from top half guard, rather than trying to finish, I mean, using that as a threat while you free your legs and complete the pass, it's a super easy way to get past someone's guard once you've got that locked up. Speaker 2: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, there are definitely ways to finish the Kimura from the closed guard and the top half guard. And you brought those up and that's those are great examples, Steve, because those are probably the two hardest positions to finish a Kimura if the other guy's moderately strong. But by finish, we mean getting the submission. You can, of course. There are ways you can switch reverse Kimura grips and blah, blah, blah. There are there are ways to finish it and as your technique gets better, you'll find those ways. But if you end up in one of these muscle versus muscle situations, especially the top half guard, man, you've got so many more options. That's in fact my very favorite Kimura setup is if I'm on top of you in half guard and you're doing the right thing and you're framing on my neck with your far arm, your arm that's on the far side of the body from me, that is just giving somebody the Kimura. And it's actually interesting because I assume we'd probably want to talk Kimura finishing mechanics. But there are sort of two ways, if you want, to chase the Kimura. The first is going for the wrist first. So this is the old method that everybody learned. You go in the closed guard, the guy's put his hand on the ground for some reason that isn't exactly clear. You open your legs, you scoot your hips back, you control the wrist, you sit up, you reach over the shoulder and you lock your hands together. In a world of techniques that never ever happened beyond white belt, you know, I'll I'll present this one as as one that's pretty unlikely to happen. But that is an example of going for the wrist first. Sometimes, it's much more advantageous to go for the armpit first. And that's typically what I do if I'm on top in half guard. Is I forget about the wrist completely and I hunt for the armpit. And I call this the fishing rod principle. If I had a fishing rod, you could try and grab the tip of that fishing rod, but it's moving pretty fast. It it's kind of difficult. You don't know where that the tip of the fishing rod in this analogy, that would be the wrist is going to be. But if you grab the handle of the fishing rod, that's not moving nearly as fast. So what's the handle of the fishing rod in the arm analogy? It's as high up the body as you can go. It's right into the armpit. That's not where you want your grip to be for finishing it, but that is where you want to go for that initial control, just to bite a control grip on that arm. So now you can start inching your way down the arm. Eventually, you're going to want if you're sort of looping over the guy's left arm with your left arm, I usually like going right for the armpit. When I finish it, I actually want my forearm closer to the elbow because we're trying to create a lever. We're trying to create a lever and if you can the longer the lever, the more powerful the torque on whatever it is that you're trying to lever. So it's funny, I'm using lever as the noun and lever as the verb. I don't wonder if that's a consistent. Speaker 1: We're very much confusing our American listeners right now, I think. That you know, that's one of my favorite things about doing this podcast is I get so many people who ask me, why do you say lever instead of lever? And I have to sometimes remind them that, you know, our countries pronounce words differently. But I find it interesting that you're using both pronunciations. That's new. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's just means I'm very, very confused. But yeah, this idea of you can either go for the armpit first or you can go for the wrist first. That's a useful way of looking at catching the Kimura initially. Right? To finish it, you want to start moving out towards the elbow. Right? You want the arm that is coming over the upper arm and through the armpit. You want that out towards the elbow. And you want the other hand as far down the wrist as you can get, typically. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. This is a martial art, not a martial science. So there are a lot of exceptions, but as a first order heuristic, that's a pretty good one. Speaker 1: Now you say this is a martial art and not a a martial science. Speaker 2: You are doing your best to turn it into a science. Speaker 1: Hey, we cosplay as scientists in this sport, right? We like to use scientific words and lingo to try to make ourselves come across as smarter. So I'm going to do that right now. I want to talk a little bit about the physics behind this because you talked about leverage and and the angle to get the the arm at and the way to to to chase this. When you're attacking someone's limb like an arm or a leg, there's a few different ways you can do it. Ultimately, if you want to submit someone, you need to be able to lock up all of the joints in their arm, right? So that's going to mean their shoulder, their elbow and their wrist. You need to have a degree of control over all of them if you want to get a a quality submission on someone. But how do you start that sequence is an interesting thing. A lot of the time, people start at the end of the chain, the end of the lever. So like you said, they'll grab the wrist and then they'll work their way up. And that works. There's a lot of times to do that. Like a lot of guard passes start like this where you first deal with the ankle and then the knee and then you get to the hip. Um that's something that I know Christian Woodmansee calls the ladder system of passing. You kind of climb it like a ladder. But you can also go the other way. And again, this is something that I know Bernacki's talked about and he cited Lochlan Giles as being a guy who does this where sometimes you start at the torso joint. So that would mean you start at the armpit or you start at the hip. And then you work your way down the chain. So you would go then to the elbow and then to the wrist. And it doesn't really matter which you do as long as at the end of the day, you're immobilizing those joints. I've talked about the three joint rule on this podcast, right? Um having a single joint, like grabbing someone by their wrist, it's something, but it's not really a ton of control. It's more of just like a grip threat. Once you get two joints immobilized, like the wrist and the elbow, now you've got some real control. But if you want to actually finish someone, you have to have the entire limb immobilized, right? They should not be able to move any of those three major joints. So they should not be able to rotate their shoulder, they should not be able to extend or bend their elbow, they should not be able to turn their wrist. How you do that, how you get to that point is kind of up to you, right? So you can start at the end and work your way up. But I actually like to do what you do, which is I find that if I try to reach and grab a person's wrists like I'm going for a Kimura, first of all, it's so incredibly telegraphed now that most people, they're just not going to be caught off guard by that. But also, if you do that, because of the way that the Kimura works, you kind of have to rotate your body and expose a little bit of your back to the person, and I've been punished by doing that, right? If you reach for the for the wrist to get the Kimura and they're just a bit faster than you, then you can wind up in a bad position. Whereas I like your idea, especially from like top half guard, of putting your weight on top of the person and locking them up by the armpit. And then you start trying to get to the elbow and then to the wrist, and then you've got a kind of a safer way in my opinion of getting to the Kimura. Much of the time when I see beginners struggling with the Kimura, it's because they start at the end of the lever. They try to get a double wrist lock on the person, and that opens up a lot of things and it's very obvious. Whereas if you can immobilize the someone, like a shoulder clamp or something like that, then you can start to actually trap the rest of the arm. So working armpit out rather than working wrist in can be a big change if you're struggling to finish that move or even just get a good grip on people. I especially find as a smaller person, I find it really hard to go for the wrists and then get it tight enough to actually get control. But if I start from the armpit, it makes it easier for me to keep control and then get my hands to a place where it feels comfortable, even if I'm sparring with some giant person with massive biceps. Probably not a problem you deal with, Stephen, because you're a lot bigger than me, but when you have shorter arms, when you go for things like the Kimura, limb length and even like bicep thickness becomes very much a a consideration because if you can't get a strong figure four on the person, then you've got to figure out a different way to position your body to make all this work. Speaker 2: Well, limb length is certainly a consideration. The hardest type of person to finish a Kimura on is the guy with short little T-Rex arms and great big biceps and great big shoulders. But that's when you the game comes into use it as a handle to either move your opponent or move yourself around your opponent. The best example there really is the T-Kimura. So the T-Kimura, we're perpendicular, your head's on my belly. There's basically not a Kimura finish from there. That is 100% a control position. You can transition into Kimura attacks, but you're using a combination of arm extension and arm retraction to control whether he's if he's turning away from you, you're obviously going to pull your arms in towards you. If he's trying to turn down towards your legs, you pull the other way. But most of the time, he's going to be turning in towards you, which means you need to punch your arm straight. And you're doing all this pushing and pulling and other adjustments and using your legs to set up other attacks, but you're not even thinking about finishing the Kimura. And that works on a guy with short little arms and it works on a great with guy with great big long arms. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, definitely. That's a great point you brought up though. The the difference in how much you want their elbow extended and separated depending on what you're trying to do. Right? If you're trying to finish the Kimura, you have to pull their elbow free from their body most of the time, unless you're doing some weird variant. Um this is something Ryan Hall refers to as the open elbow concept, right? The idea that if I want to finish the Kimura, I have to pull the elbow free. If you're a beginner and you're really struggling to finish the Kimura, one of the first things to look at is where is my opponent's elbow? Is it tight against their ribs or is it floating up in space? Because the goal to finish a Kimura as a submission is I pull the arm free and I basically turn their their arm into a ratchet. It should be like an Allen key, right? Where it's sticking out at a 90 degree angle and then I rotate it at a 90 degree angle. That's how you get maximum torque. So if you want to finish, that's the position that you want to get to. But sometimes you're not trying to finish, right? In the case of the um the Kimura trap from the T-Kimura, which is I mean, it's kind of like an upside down crucifix, right? It's where you are laying down on your sort of on your back and the other person is kind of laying on your lap, but they can't turn towards you because you've got a Kimura grip on their arm. If you try to pull their elbow free, you're probably not going to find the space to do it from there. Speaker 2: And you're going to allow them to turn in and come up on top of you. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: Which isn't the end of the world, but it's not it's not great. You've gone down the positional hierarchy at that point. Speaker 1: Yeah. So in this position, you often wind up pushing your arms out, extending your arms. And that means that your opponent's elbow is actually going to be probably pretty close to their ribs, probably touching their ribs. And that's not going to allow you to finish the Kimura, like you said. But this is not a Kimura finishing position. This is a control position. You're probably trying to set up things like armbars or access to their neck or something else, right? Or to get up into the T-Kimura where you have better finishing power. So knowing your goal matters because if you're trying to submit, you want to pull the elbow free to get maximum torque. If you're using control, you might not want to pull their elbow free quite yet. It might be okay to have their elbow pinched into their ribs. Probably you're not going to finish from there unless you switch to some sort of weird Kimura slicer, which can be done. But that might prevent them from turning towards you, which is a big part of the Kimura trap game. Speaker 2: You run into the exact same dynamic in the near side Kimura control because the what if you're behind your opponent's back, he's up on his side and you're Kimuraring his right arm, you're going to be behind him and you're going to have your left hand on his on his right wrist and then you're tying up your own Kimura grip. His counter to that is to get his elbow to the floor. It's to turn in towards you. The same way that the most common T-Kimura escape is for the guy to explosively and dynamically turn in towards you. It retract that elbow. So by extending your arms, you're flaring that elbow out a bit. And now that you're also lifting that elbow off the floor in the case of the T-Kimura. And that makes it much, much harder for him to turn in because essentially he's torquing his arm. And this is times when you might not even go with a standard Kimura grip where instead of having your five fingers controlling the wrist and then your five fingers controlling your own wrist, you might end up making a fist with the hand that's coming underneath his upper elbow. Why? Because it gives you a just a little bit more rotation when you're extending your arms. So you'll sometimes see guys doing the Kimura grip and only one of their hands is gripping. The other hand is a fist. It's basically a hammer fist to your own wrist. And that makes the power of controlling your opponent's rotation when you extend your arms just a little bit more powerful. It gives you an extra inch. Speaker 1: Yeah. And with the Kimura, that that extra inch makes a huge difference because it can be the difference between your opponent's arm feels strong and powerful versus now they can't use their bicep muscles, right? So that's one thing about the Kimura. An an inch of space one way or the other can be the difference between this move works and this move doesn't work. Speaker 2: 100%. And that in terms of finishing the Kimura, like as a submission, there are three main mechanisms going on. The first one is just the rotation of the arm, right? The using essentially the elbow as the center of the clock and moving the hand around the edge of the clock and eventually bring that hand up towards the back of the the back of the head. The second mechanism is removing space by pulling the guy's elbow up towards his ear. Or the other way people think about this is they move their head the guy's elbow away from his hands. So if you're standing out there in kind of a scarecrow position, the opposite of don't shoot. If you're standing up and your arms are out to the side and your hands are hanging down, you can probably move your hand somewhat behind your back. But if you lift your elbows up towards your ears, you can barely move that hand at all. So there, moving the elbow even an inch or a couple of inches up towards your ear means that you need so much less strength to finish the submission. And then the third mechanism is I call it pulling the arm out of the socket where you're kind of applying all the other mechanisms, but you're also stretching his arm away from him. This comes up in positions say in the bottom of half guard when you're stepping over the guy's head to step on his hip and you get a really strong extension. There's also a way to do it from the T-Kimura where you you essentially bring your top leg over the guy's entire body over his head and step on his the hip that's closest to you. It doesn't allow for a ton of rotation in that configuration, but man, does it allow for a ton of extension. A lot of that pulling the elbow away from his body and that just gives it removes a lot of the slack in the shoulder socket and makes it makes it more powerful. So if you are trying to finish it on somebody, obviously you're going to rotate, but if you can move the elbow up, it's kind of the opposite of the Americana. The way to make the Americana work is to move the guy's elbow down towards his his belt. In the way to finish a Kimura, if you're thinking in side control terms, is to move the guy's elbow up towards his ear. And then the the pulling the joint out of socket. You're not actually pulling it out of socket, but that's what that's the visual I'd like to think about. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. It occurs to me that a few times on this chat, we've talked about torque and what that is. And I mean, look, if we want to cosplay as scientists, we might want to explain that concept. I actually just wrote a a newsletter about this because it's a term that gets thrown around a lot in Jiu-Jitsu, but people might not really understand how to apply it. I mean, Stephen, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way that I've explained it is torque is the rotational aspect of linear force. And what that actually means is like when you're pushing or pulling against something, the part that makes something rotate, that's the torque. So the classic example is imagine a door that's, you know, hinged onto a wall, right? If you want to close that door, when you push the door, the part that's making it rotate on the on the hinge, that that aspect of the force, that's the torque. And what you'll find is if you try to close a door by pushing it at the end, close to where the door handle is, it's pretty easy to push a door closed. If you try to push a door closed closer to the hinge, it takes a lot more force. You have to push a lot harder to get it done. And that's because of leverage, right? The longer the lever, the more leverage you're going to get. So when you push a door closed close to the handle, you have a lot of leverage. When you push a door closed close to the hinge, you don't have that much leverage. So when we're doing a Kimura, we want to try to get maximum torque. And the way that we do that is we get the longest lever possible, which means we try to get their elbow as far away from the body as we can. And to do that, that means you're going to have the elbow out kind of perpendicular, ideally at a 90 degree angle. That's where you get maximum torque is at that 90 degree angle. And then you rotate at the end of the lever, right? Close to the the elbow. Kind of hard to to rotate anywhere else in the case of a Kimura. But that's the idea of torque, right? It's the rotational aspect of force. The longer the lever, the more torque you're going to have, and the more perpendicular their arm is, the more at a 90 degree angle, the more torque you're going to have. Does that sound like a correct explanation, Stephen? I think I covered it properly. Speaker 2: That's an amazing analogy, Steve. The idea of using a door, closing a door, where you push on the door. We all know this intuitively and that explains it so well. So I'm I'm going to steal that myself. Because before I forget, this idea of opening the elbow away from the body, you're talking about the open elbow concept. The way that I express it is that all the elbows are mine. If I'm trying to say the bottom of half guard. The bottom of half guard is a fraught position if you're attacking with a Kimura because if you screw up, the guy on top can Kimura you. If he can essentially pop his armpit over top of your elbow or even just make posture, your Kimura turns into your liability and it turns into his Kimura. But the way to counter that in part is to make sure that all the elbows are yours. Your elbows are close to you and his elbow is close to you. And that means it's pulled away from his body. There is an exception, this idea of maximum torque being generated if the guy's forearm is 90 degrees to his own humerus, his own upper arm. That is generally true and that is the way that I was taught to do the Kimura. That's the way I did the Kimura for years. There are variations now that are coming out where we break that rule. I call it the near grip Kimura where you essentially bring his hand right in close to his body. And it's an acceptable trade-off because it allows you more of a pushing motion with the hand that controls the wrist. It ends up looking a little bit like an uppercut. This is a a modification that I think works much better for no-gi than for gi because if you if we're rolling in the gi and you bring my hand close to my body, I'm going to grab something. I'm going to grab my lapel. I'm going to grab my belt. I'm going to grab cloth somewhere and it's going to complicate you finishing it. But there are some grip variations where you break that 90 degree rule, but it's it's because you're trading off increasing pushing power and you're trying to also limit the extent to which he can tricep extension his way out of your Kimura. If a guy has a super strong pushing motion, a super strong triceps, sometimes they can basically hammer fist their way out. And if you take their arm and you shove it in real close to their body, it limits that to a a fair extent. Martial art rather than martial science, there are exceptions. Speaker 1: That's a good point. With torque, when we talk about torque, we have to remember, the goal of a Kimura is not to get maximum torque. The goal of a Kimura is to get a submission. And creating torque is one way to do it, but there's other ways to get enough breaking force on someone's arm that they have to submit. One of my favorite Kimura variants is the Phil Davis Kimura. I'm surprised that more people don't use this. He used this in the in the UFC many, many years ago. Basically, what it is is you get on top of someone in north-south and then you hammer lock them. It's like a pro wrestling move. You basically grab their their wrist and then you kind of pull it behind their back while you're on top of them in north-south. I mean, are you getting maximum torque? Not really because you don't have the right angle. But the fact that you're sitting on the person with your body weight on top of theirs on top of their arm as you twist it, it's a very powerful submission. And this I think is an important consideration for people going for the Kimura or really any submission. We always have to remember, it's not about making it look right, it's about making it feel right. So a common mistake is people will think in their head that a Kimura means I've got that double wrist lock. I've got a figure four and I need to get that. And sometimes people get a figure four on someone and technically they have their hands in the right position, but they just don't have any power. They can't get any any twist on the person. If that's the case, you have the appearance of a Kimura but not a real Kimura. And so you need to think less about are my hands in the right place and more about am I actually able to twist this person's arm? So often when you're sparring against a big person, that's where the advice you gave earlier about attacking from the armpit down helps a lot because when you do that, you can tighten up to their armpit and then you can position your hands wherever it feels the strongest. Um and the the Phil Davis Kimura is another great example of one that technically doesn't look like a a proper Kimura, but man, when you get that done to you, it sucks to be stuck in it. So there's a lot of variants and I with every submission I encourage this, but with the Kimura specifically, I always tell people, understand there is a difference between making it look right and making it feel right. If your hands are in the right place, but it doesn't feel like you have enough strength to twist the arms, or if it's hurting your arms as much as it's hurting theirs, then you need to make some adjustment. Even if your hands are technically in the right position, you might need to shuffle things around based on your body type in relation to theirs. I mean, the Phil Davis Kimura is is super interesting. I've used variations of it. It also goes back to strategy. If you're fighting in MMA, there's almost no submission that's worth abandoning top position for. Maybe in the last 10 seconds of a round, maybe. Because if you end up on the bottom after your your submission attempt goes poorly, you are going to probably eat leather and you're going to watch your Jiu-Jitsu skills go from black belt, you get punched in the head, you're going to go to brown belt, you get punched in the head, you're going to go to purple belt, you get punched in the head, you're going to be a blue belt, you're going to be a white belt in no time. So this idea of strategy, you know, you're you're doing a less than optimal technique, but the odds of the guy sitting up on you and rolling you or rolling you to the bottom are pretty low. And actually, I think this is something that I learned from Chris Brennan years ago. He was an early adopter of the Kimura. The classic Kimura finish from side control, where you lock up the side control, then you switch your hips and then you step over the head. Kind of you step your foot into that space between the guy's ear and the guy's shoulder on the far side of his body. I don't like that at all. I mean, it just opens up the possibility for your opponent to start developing momentum and come up and roll you to the bottom. Not necessarily the end of the world if you know how to finish, but why not stay on top? So if if people can visualize this, if I'm applying a Kimura on somebody and their head is 12 o'clock and their far arm is say 3 o'clock, I don't like to step to 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock. I don't like to step over the head. I like to step my head exactly in line with their head. So my foot ends up say 12 inches north of their head, still in that 12 o'clock line. And then use a slight inward pressure with my knee on their face. I'm not kneeing them in the head, but what that knee is doing is preventing their head from coming up. And so you're preventing, you're taking out a couple extra inches of motion that the guy could use to relieve pressure on his shoulder and you're greatly limiting the potential that he's going to sit up far enough to roll you to the bottom. In a Jiu-Jitsu or submission grappling context, ending up on the bottom, not necessarily the end of the world. In an MMA or self-defense situation, that's a pretty serious error. Speaker 1: Yeah, you bring up a great point about how a lot of the classic Kimura positions, the finishes, they require you to pull the person up off the ground a bit. And it makes sense, right? Because if the person has their shoulders, both of them pinned to the mat, you really can't do a classic Kimura because you can't twist that arm behind my back. There are variants. The the Phil Davis Kimura is one of those. But if you want to do a classic Kimura, you have to pull them up. And that can be quite dangerous. For those reasons, I often like I don't really finish the Kimura from half guard anymore because of the reason you brought up. If you pull the person up, there is the possibility that they will come up with you and explode and get up on top. And I don't want to run that risk, especially if I'm in half guard, because now I'm in I'm on half guard bottom, right? If that happens to me and that's not good. So I think that's important to understand. But the flip side of this is one of the easiest ways to defend the Kimura is keep both your shoulders pinned to the mat, right? You can't Kimura me if you can't rotate my arm behind my back. So if you can force the person that you're attacking to self-pin, to pin both of their shoulders because they're afraid of the Kimura, now they can't really do much of anything. You're free to pass and go to the T-Kimura or do whatever you want. So when you're in that position like half guard, rather than pulling the person up to finish the Kimura, which might actually help them, I suggest like let them stay pinned and use that for positional advancement. The only time I can think of where I really want to pull them up to finish the Kimura is the T-Kimura because from there, you've got so much base and it's so strong that if their head is wedged between both of your knees and you pull them up to their side, there's really nothing they can do about it, regardless of how big and strong they are. Speaker 2: Yeah, the teabag is a pretty powerful position. If I had to finish somebody and I was in the Kimura, I would switch and they and I just couldn't break the grip. No matter what I did, I would go to the teabag and I would go to an armbar because an armbar is a more powerful grip breaking position than the Kimura. And from the teabag, there are a couple of roots and also from the near side Kimura, there are a couple of very powerful roots to the armbar. Now you're essentially using the entire power of your posterior chain against the power of his hand. So that's always an option. If my opponent wants to keep both of his shoulders on the ground, there is a way to finish the Kimura with both hands on the ground and that's with what I call the fat old lazy man Kimura. And again, there's a YouTube video out there that I want to say is like eight years old. And this is where you circle around to north-south, but you don't yank the guy up on his side. You leave him flat and then you displace your body weight off so that it's it's all your body weight goes through your ribs into the guy's shoulder. You're essentially forgetting about the rest of his body. You've got your Kimura grip and you slowly lower your body weight onto the guy's shoulder. It's shockingly effective. Speaker 1: I love that move. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those, this should not work. It's funny because no one ever thinks about it. The only reason I even know about this is because 15 years or so ago, I watched a YouTube video by you about this exact technique and I love it because it catches people so off guard. People when they expect you to finish the Kimura from top, they expect you to lean across them, to attack the far arm. And so you're kind of draped on top of the person, you're pancaking them. Whereas if you go all the way around to the other side, almost so you're like north-south to them, but your entire body is on one side of theirs. It's all all on top of their arm. You basically Kimura them on the near side. It's way harder to get up from that than people might think. Because you kind of look at that and you think, well, where's the control point? How is the person being held down? But if your entire body weight is on their shoulder and then you start lifting their arm a bit to twist them a bit, they really can't do anything. That you've immobilized all three joints of their arm and it's super hard for them to do anything but tap. Speaker 2: I don't have a good escape for that position. Like that's a terminal position unless the person's just some freaking nature and has, you know, quadruple jointed shoulders. Okay, cool. You know, it's like, my chokes aren't working on this guy with a 22-inch neck. Well, okay, don't choke them. But yeah, that fat old lazy man Kimura has has saved my ass so many times, it's not even funny. And it goes together super well with the near side Kimura control because the guy's going to be trying to rip his elbow down to the floor, which is a bad thing in general. But if you can follow that, if you can surf off that motion, you take himself right into the fat old lazy man Kimura. So yeah, it's it's once again, it's having these answers and how all these things connect together is really the the most important thing. And I'd say the other most important thing, there are probably three positions that you need to spend way more time in to master this positional-based Kimura game. I mean, if you came to me and said, Stephen, I'm going to be yanking on the Kimura from the teabag and you get to resist it and try and fight your way out. I would do it a couple of times, but I'm not going to sit there and just suffer as I, you know, you're grinding your nether bits into my face and once in a while you yank my arm and it hurts. You know, that's that's a limited game. We're not going to play that one too many times. Or the other great game. I'm going to get the closed guard Kimura and you're going to use all your energy to like get your elbows in and stall and I'm going to use all my energy to try and break the grip. Yeah, we don't learn that much for each minute of doing that. But where training time is really powerfully allocated is isolating things like the Kimura from the back of the weak side. If we start there and we get the Kimura on the the bottom arm, the weak side, and we move our bottom leg up into a lap belt position, rather than leaving that foot in between the ground, or leaving that foot in between the legs. And then we say go. And my goal is just to maintain that position and your goal is just to escape. And then after we do that a few times, we we change. And then we slowly begin adding in submissions. Not only is my goal to remain in that position, but it's also to throw in submissions that come along with different opportunities. We're going to both get really good, really fast. Another position that would be equivalent is the near side Kimura. We isolate it. First, my only goal is to hold you in the near side Kimura. So basically, we're going to be circling because you're going to be circling towards me, trying to get your elbow down to the ground. I'm going to be circling away towards your head and trying to lift your top elbow. But that makes both of us good. That makes both of us good and it's not that hard on the body. Then we add in things like now the guy on the top can throw in submissions. The submission doesn't have to be a Kimura. The submission could be an armbar. The submission could be a triangle choke. The submission could be a north-south choke. So if we do that for the the weak side back control, if we do that for the near side Kimura, and we do that for the T-Kimura, again, same progression. All I'm trying to do is hold you in the T-Kimura and you're trying to get away. And then I'm trying to hold you in the Kimura and then we add in submissions that come up as you turn left, as you turn right, as you grip fight, as I'm using my legs to try and entangle your arms or come over your head. Those are dynamic positions and we can learn an awful lot. It's kind of like doing guard retention from the closed guard, which is kind of boring. And guard retention from the open guard, which is fun and exciting for everybody. Yeah. Well said, man. Well, I think we did a great job here of breaking down some of the key concepts behind the Kimura. Anything else you wanted to get into that we missed? Speaker 2: I think those are the main things. I think if you start thinking of the Kimura as a position, by which I mean, looking at the different positions that you can apply the Kimura in and having a a couple of transitions and a couple of finishes from each, then it's going to start unlocking this position because no matter where you end up, no matter what the guy does, there's a good chance that you can follow him, control him, and probably finish him. So the positional-based approach is very, very powerful for this submission and it's it's not just for the Kimura, not just for big guys anymore. Speaker 1: Nice. Well, as we tie this up, of course, people who have listened to this and uh resonate with the ideas might want some sort of visual reference. The more we get into specifics, the more it helps to actually see what you're talking about here. And I know you do have an instructional on this. Do you want to talk about that and what people can expect? Speaker 2: Well, yes, uh thank you very much for allowing me to mention it. It's the Kimura roadmap. It's basically using this positional-based approach to the roughly 12 most important Kimura positions, giving you options, giving you transitions, giving you submissions, giving you ways to finish the Kimura, giving you ways to finish Kimura adjacent submissions. And I think it should really make a difference and really make concrete the higher level tactics we've been playing, we've been talking about. I mean, if you go and play with just those positions and try and follow it and maintain them as control positions rather than finishing it, you can learn this stuff on your own. Like the information is out there. But if you want a leg up, if you want a head start, then Kimura roadmap would be a pretty good start. Speaker 1: Amazing, man. Well, you know that you're always my first recommendation for Jiu-Jitsu instructionals. So I will throw links to all of that in the show notes if people want to check out the new Grapple Arts Kimura roadmap instructional, that'll be there for you. I will also put a link to our stuff. Everything that we make lives at BJJmentalmodels.com, so it's easy to find. The podcast is completely free. We've got full-length episodes like this, plus mini episodes if you want to get to the point quicker and talk about some of the big ideas in Jiu-Jitsu. I'd also recommend signing up to our newsletter. We're getting close to 15,000 subscribers and all of that's free. And if you want to level up with us, take it to the next level, BJJ Mental Models Premium is my number one recommendation for that. Well, us, that's how we pay the bills here. There's a lot of reasons to sign up. It is uh the world's biggest library of audio content in Jiu-Jitsu. If this kind of structure resonates with you, talking about concepts in a verbal way, that's really the thing that put us on the map. We've got a massive library of audio courses on concepts, the kind of things that are more easily said than shown through video. Like I mentioned earlier, we've got a great course on there with Rob Bernacki about submission as position and we talk specifically about the Kimura. We're also expanding a lot into other forms of Jiu-Jitsu educational content. We've just started releasing two audio documentaries, one by Emily Quack on motherhood in Jiu-Jitsu, and one by Ben Van Doren and Eva Schubert on kind of the dark side of Jiu-Jitsu history. Really interesting stuff that I'm I'm just absolutely thrilled to be able to make and the feedback so far has been overwhelming. So just yet another reason to sign up. All of that's at BJJmentalmodels.com, but I will put a link in the show notes. Stephen, my friend, thank you for doing this. I thought this was a really awesome chat. Speaker 2: Thanks so much, Steve, and thank you for everything that you do. Speaker 1: Most welcome, sir. Thank you to the listeners as well. Really do appreciate everyone hanging out with us. We'll talk to you soon.