Ep. 359: Old Bastard Closed Guard, feat. Mike Mahaffey & Jesse Walker

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 episode 359. 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 panel episode. I think the collective age of this entire panel is something like 150 years. This is an official old bastard panel. Because from Old Bastard Jiu-Jitsu, I've got Mike Mahaffey. Mike, how's it going? Speaker 2: I'm doing awesome, Steve. How are you? Speaker 1: Also doing good. And I've also got from Rough Hands BJJ, Jesse Walker. Jesse, how's it going? Speaker 3: Hey, Steve, how are you? Great to be here. Speaker 1: Always great to talk to you guys. You know, before we hit record, we were actually talking about Jesse's gorilla combatives expertise, and it occurs to me, I don't think we've ever talked about this on the feed, Jesse. Do you want to tell this story? Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. So, I Speaker 1: You don't sound like you want to tell this story. Speaker 3: No. Speaker 2: I need to hear the story again. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm having to recall it a little bit. So, you know, as with, with, you know, anybody that runs a business, we get tons of really bizarre spam email during the day. And I had one come through one morning that was like, opportunity for a CNN interview. And I didn't think much of it, but for whatever reason, I didn't delete it immediately. And a couple minutes later, as I was in my inbox, I went and looked back through it, and I'm like, wow, this actually looks legitimate. And it was like, we want you to come on and talk about, at the time, it was the one man versus, or 100 men versus one gorilla debate. It was a big viral thing for a few days. And I started looking up the names that were referenced in the email, and I'm like, holy smokes, these people actually work at CNN. And I'm like, surely this can't be real. And everything I did to authenticate it indicated that it was the real deal. So I reached out to them, and I was like, is this something that you really want to do? And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Can you do it today? Can you do it this afternoon? And I'm like, sure. And so, sure enough, I had a live interview on CNN about my thoughts about 100 men versus one gorilla. And it was, uh, surreal to say the least. Speaker 1: I still can't believe this actually happened, but it did, and I will put a link in the show notes. If people want to see Jesse Walker here on CNN explaining the strategy behind 100 men taking on one gorilla and who would win. Just an incredible conversation. So, I can actually safely say that at least in the eyes of the media, Jesse, you are the world's foremost expert on man-to-gorilla combatives. Speaker 3: I'm not sure it's a title I want, but I guess it's a title I have to accept. Speaker 1: We all have burdens we have to bear. Speaker 2: Right. Oh my God. Oh my God. I can't even hold it in for this episode. Jesus. Speaker 1: We're off to a great start. Speaker 2: Oh, that's so good. We are, 100%. I love it. Speaker 1: I will put those links in the show notes because I think people definitely need to see them. But anyway, all of this aside, we actually wanted to talk about something else. There have been a few topics that have been percolating around for a while. You guys actually just had a seminar on this topic, and that got me thinking, this would be a great opportunity to get some fan favorite guests back on to talk about these concepts. So, Jesse at Rough Hands BJJ, you guys just did a big grand reopening of the gym, right? Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Speaker 3: Yeah, so we just moved the location just a couple miles down the road to a much nicer, uh, facility. And for that, we had a big day with a number of events, and we thought it would be great to, to bring Mike down from Michigan to teach all of us how to play closed guard like an old bastard, and it was a great time. Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's where Mike comes into play here. So, long-time listeners of the podcast have almost certainly heard Mike advocating for the old bastard style of jiu-jitsu on here. We've got many episodes we've done with him in the past on this topic. We actually have a whole course on old bastard jiu-jitsu on BJJ Mental Models Premium. But Mike, my understanding is you guys were specifically talking about the old bastard method of playing closed guard. And so I thought this would be a great chat to get you guys together and maybe introduce some of those concepts because it's important for people to know this, especially as they get older, or if they're giving up athletic advantages, a lot of the things we traditionally get taught about closed guard fall apart real quick. So I wanted to get your feedback on how you've developed your game to work around that. Speaker 2: Awesome. I'm happy to do it. And I, before we get into it, I'm going to thank Jesse again for having me down. Jesse and I have become, he, he's one of my jiu-jitsu besties at this point, and it's always a pleasure to visit Rough Hands, and Jesse and his lovely bride and his students are just great people, and, uh, I can't wait to, uh, make it down there again. It's a, a great school. So thank you so much for having me, Jesse. It was a, a wonderful weekend. So, closed guard. So Jesse and I talked about this, and, uh, when he asked me to come down and teach a seminar at his grand reopening, I had told him, I've already been down there and taught a couple times. You guys know all my jiu-jitsu. What more can I teach? And he suggested closed guard because, if I may say so, uh, Jesse's not a huge fan of it. It's not his favorite guard, which is fine. Like, we all have different bodies and we all like to play different things in jiu-jitsu. But I'm a huge fan of closed guard, specifically because I'm older and less athletic than a lot of the people I train with. And I like to use closed guard as a way to slow things down, to negate my sparring partner's athleticism, to, uh, trap them and wear them out, uh, while I get some relative rest, as much as you can rest when somebody else is trying to pin you and strangle you, and really just use that to break their will to fight. Just like you would from the top when I talked in the past about making somebody carry your weight, I like to do the same thing from the bottom and just wear them out until the point that they don't want to fight anymore, or I can do what I want, which is usually sweep and get on top because I prefer to play on top if I have my druthers. So, that's why I love to use cold, or love to use closed guard as an older grappler. I just find that I don't have the attributes to keep up with these young, spry grapplers as they're dancing around me doing their loose passing. I can't keep up with them in an open guard. There's not enough points of connection, there's not enough control of their movement and posture. So, for me, closed guard is the ideal guard to master as you get older in jiu-jitsu. Speaker 1: Now, for those who either didn't listen to the old episodes or maybe have forgotten, Mike, I know you've got three tenets behind this old bastard philosophy of jiu-jitsu. We did a whole episode on that, which I will link in the show notes, and of course, we've got a course that we made together to really expand on it. But for those who missed that part of the conversation, do you want to quickly recap what you mean here when you say old bastard jiu-jitsu? How is that maybe different or a deviation from the way that most people might think of jiu-jitsu? Speaker 2: Oh, you're going to make me recap the stuff that we talked about two years ago? Good lord. I'm old. You think I can remember this stuff? So, let me see. In my mind, old bastard jiu-jitsu is really all about taking the athleticism out of your jiu-jitsu practice, right? Even if you're not old, uh, it entails training as if you are and really honing those fundamentals, the things that make jiu-jitsu really work, that make jiu-jitsu work when you're not fast and strong or limber or super coordinated even, right? And so, the first one of those tenets is never give up your base, right? Your base may get taken away from you because, you know, you're grappling another human being and they're trying to do stuff to you that you don't want them to do, but never do any motions or do any, uh, technique that is going to force you to give up your base against your opponent. And then the second tenet is never give an inch back. When you make progress, don't willingly cede that space, right? Again, space can get taken from you, and that's a whole different story, but don't give up the progress you've made in terms of of a positional hierarchy on purpose, right? So don't give up your base, never give an inch back, and the third and one of, well, they're all really important, but the one that I've been focusing on a lot lately is always make them carry your weight. When you are older, smaller, less athletic than your, uh, jiu-jitsu sparring partners, it's imperative that you work on wearing them out. And one of the best ways to wear them out is to make them carry you. When somebody's tired, they just don't fight as well. So, one way to tire them out is to always make them carry you around. So those are my three tenets, and we can get into whenever you're ready, how they apply to closed guard because I feel that they all apply in different ways. Speaker 1: Definitely. This is what I, I want to transition into here then. So, with those three principles in mind, how do they inform the way that you play closed guard, and how might that be different from the way that people have been taught or maybe that younger athletes would play? Speaker 2: Well, the way I've played played closed guard over the years has, uh, evolved. And I definitely used to play it like a younger athlete and was not nearly as successful with it, right? So, let's take a look at the first tenet, never give up your base. People might think that you don't really have base in closed guard, right? Because the way I've come to think about base is creating a structure with your body that allows you to absorb or impart force into your opponent, which is usually done by posting off of a solid, immovable object, which is usually the mat, but not always. And so that's where people might think, well, where do you get base when you're lying on your back with your legs wrapped around somebody? Your opponent is what you're typically posting off of in closed guard. So I create base by putting my weight on my opponent in my closed guard. And you do that with your hips in certain ways that are really kind of hard to describe in audio-only podcast. We talked about that when I was at Rough Hands doing the seminar last weekend, but you're creating your base off of your opponent. That also ties in into the third tenet, making them carry your weight. So in order to create base off my opponent, I have to put my weight on my opponent from the bottom. And the main way that I do that is with my hips. The certain way that you position your hips and you get your hips kind of up in your partner's lap, so you're sitting on them more than you are just squeezing with your legs, right? And this allows you to create base using them as your stable point, and also makes them carry you, which makes it exhausting to be in your closed guard and really hard to stand up and disengage. So you can have more control over when you give that space if you want to. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes. I was actually just recording a course with Emily Kwok, and she said something very similar, which I loved. She said that when she is playing top position, especially when passing the guard, she wants to make the person on the bottom feel like they're carrying a 20-pound vase. And basically, I can't drop this vase. So she's using her weight on top of them to make it them feel like they have to carry this awkward object while they're fighting. I think that's pretty much the same concept you're talking about here when you say make them carry your weight. Speaker 2: Yes, yes. That's why Emily's the goat. Speaker 1: That is true. Speaker 2: Definitely. Speaker 1: So, let me ask then here, structurally, like how does this look? Because the challenge I've always had with closed guard is it was sort of sold to me as the traditional fundamental guard when I started jiu-jitsu. I think that mentality is starting to change. I know there's a lot of people now who think of closed guard more as an advanced guard, and they actually teach open guard first, which I think is an interesting idea. But when I got started, closed guard was one of the first positions that they would teach you. It was sort of looked at as this fundamental aspect of jiu-jitsu. I did move on from it pretty quickly though, because like you, I found that there are some real limitations to closed guard. You know, it might work in the competition situation where you and your opponent are sort of on par in terms of size, skill, and athleticism, but I found that this particular guard does not hold up when there's a big deviation between you and your opponent. So I'd like to hear about from your perspective, what the weaknesses of traditional closed guard are and maybe how you work around those. Speaker 2: Well, I think the weaknesses of traditional closed guard, as I remember being taught it early in my jiu-jitsu career, was, like I said, it relied a lot using your muscular strength to squeeze and hold somebody in your closed guard, right? And I actually, I had a really serious injury as a blue belt because I was refusing to let a training partner of mine open my closed guard, and I ended up doing it, you know, I was squeezing him as hard as I could with my legs. I was bound and determined he wasn't going to pass my guard, and I ended up getting my adductor tendon torn right off my hip bone. I have the distinction of being the only person to be carried out of Magic BJJ via ambulance because of that, because I couldn't walk after, right? And it really made me realize that, unfortunately, it took a catastrophic injury to help me change the way I played guard, but, um, I realized I was relying on a lot of muscular strength to do that. And when I started to engage my hips in a way and create a connection with my opponent in a way that allowed me to more easily control their posture and manage the space by using my hips rather than using my leg strength and my grips, that changed closed guard for me. That made it easier to implement against people with more athleticism and strength. So, I think that answers your question. It's more about, Chris Haueter has this saying that that I've really come to love, less grips and more hips, right? And so that plays into how you play closed guard more effectively. We've got Jesse on the line, and I know Jesse may not be as huge an advocate as of closed guard as I am, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of this, Jesse, and and how it, it plays into how you play and how you teach. Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I mean, I will start by saying that I completely co-sign to everything that Mike said. I'm in a pretty different physical situation and a different type of older grappler than he is. Number one, I got blessed with the legs of an Oompa Loompa. So, I tend to have a little trouble getting around some of my higher calorie grapplers, even smaller grapplers, frankly. And my low back is shot. So, I don't have the same luxuries playing closed guard as some other folks. That's not to say that I never do it, but I have even had to play it far differently than Mike does. And, you know, it's a personality quirk of mine, when there are things that I'm not good at, I talk a lot of shit about them. So I'll go ahead and fess up to that, right? But I am, I think one of those coaches that tends to introduce open guard concepts a lot earlier than I do some of the closed guard stuff. Number one, just because I, it is not my wheelhouse and not my center of expertise, but also I think in a lot of ways it is a lot more limited than some of the other guard choices that we have. When I do play, you know, and when I'm teaching it, certainly, my big focus with people is helping them figure out how to open the closed guard under their own terms. So that tends to be as a coach, the thing that I see as being one of the biggest problems with closed guard everywhere is that people hold on to it and they rely on it far too long. Where if they Speaker 2: It's how I got injured. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's how you got injured, right? And if people get a little better and smarter and maybe humble, I don't know quite what the word is, and allow themselves to say, this probably isn't working for me anymore, at least in this instance, and I need to move to something different, rather than waiting till the very last moment when their closed guard's getting ready to get popped open, and it makes passing that guard then much, much easier. So that has certainly been one of the big focuses of my coaching efforts when I'm kind of introducing some of these concepts to my students. Speaker 1: I want to just expand on something you said there, Jesse. You talked about how people hold on to closed guard way longer than they should. Just tying this back to kind of the the root concept here, closed guard is what we would call a clamp-based guard. You're you are basically clamping your body onto your opponent and trying to prevent them from moving. Now, the thing about closed guard is it only works if you can actually break their posture and keep them down on the ground and prevent them from, you know, getting up and starting to open the guard. A lot of people mistakenly think that just because they've got their ankles closed, that they've got a strong closed guard. And that is not the case. There is nothing magical about having your ankles crossed behind another person's back. That does not give you control over them. You have to be able to use your legs to pull the person down if you want to break their posture in closed guard, and in combination with your hands, of course. You're trying to get the person's posture to come down because as soon as they can posture up, that's where probably most of the more popular closed guard breaks and passes come from. Now, again, going back in the day, if you look at the early days of jiu-jitsu, closed guard was sold as this kind of magic solution because people in a self-defense environment where they were ignorant of closed guard, they would posture down on the person and try to punch them. But in the more educated sport of jiu-jitsu now, we don't do that. People tend to posture up and try to back out and try to break the guard open. And the mistake that many of us still make is thinking that just because we've got our ankles crossed behind the person, we've got some sort of magic control. The ankle crossing doesn't do that much. They're creating a closed circuit behind their back, yes, but the most important thing is being able to use your leg muscles to pull the person in towards you. Every time they posture up, you use your leg muscles to pull them back down. If you cannot do that, either due to attributes or size or strength or maybe they're just more skilled than you, if you cannot pull them back down, just crossing your ankles behind them is not going to save you. And and this is where you get into tetherball situations where you've got your ankles crossed behind the person and you're holding on for dear life, you know, you're clinging to them like a front-facing fanny pack, and because you're not properly breaking their posture, they just stand up and pick you up, right? That's kind of the, in my opinion, one of the worst things that can happen to you when you're playing closed guard is they stand up and they take you up with them. I hate it when that happens. And all of this happens because people are getting confused about the goal of closed guard. It is not about crossing your ankles behind their back. It is about using your legs to pull them in to break their posture. And if you can't do that, you don't really have much of a closed guard, regardless of what your feet are doing. Speaker 2: Correct. And then that's when you need to get out. Like, either switch to open guard or get out and stand up, which we talked about at Rough Hands last weekend a lot too. Speaker 1: I agree. Speaker 2: I co-sign on everything you just said, and the way I teach closed guard, and the way I play closed guard is about constantly messing with the person's base and posture, right? Tenet number one, never give up your base. You want to force them to give up their base when they're in your closed guard, right? And you want to use your hips and your core to constantly mess with their base and their posture, to bring them down, bring them down into your area where you can do things to them, where you can sweep or submit, right? So, yeah, closed guard is a tool like a lot of other positions in jiu-jitsu, it's a tool to use to advance your position, to break posture, sweep or submit, not just hang out with your legs closed around somebody, right? So, yeah, 100% co-sign on everything you just said, Steve. Speaker 1: Yeah. The other interesting thing about closed guard too is because it is a clamping guard, you're generally trying to restrict the other person's movement when you are holding them in your closed guard. That's kind of the whole idea is you want to prevent them from moving. And if you look through jiu-jitsu at most of the positions where you would use a clamp, where you're clamping onto the person, usually in those positions, the goal is to restrict their movement, right? That's why you clamp onto someone is because you don't want them to move. You want to attach yourself to them and then take away their ability to start moving. You want to be like an anchor tied to them so that they can't move the way that they want. And that is very different from a lot of other guards, particularly the open guards, where with most of those, you're not really clamping onto the person, you're kind of hooking them or tracking them. You know, there's other maybe control mechanisms that you're using. You're maybe framing against them. But with a lot of open guards, you're usually not trying to hold them in position and prevent them from moving. In fact, often you want them to move because that's how you follow them or destabilize them. So, closed guard is very different because it's kind of an anti-movement guard, whereas a lot of other guards almost encourage movement. So, there's a philosophical difference between closed guard and a lot of the open guards that we might play. Speaker 2: Right. And I like to use my closed guard to force them to move in the way I want them to move, right? So, if I can break somebody's posture down and hold them down, and there's a certain tricks, for lack of a better word, to distributing your weight and hanging off them. Like I think about not just squeezing and holding somebody in closed guard, I think about hanging off them like like monkey bars, right? So instead of just squeezing and then having to fight the strength of my arms and legs, I like to make make them fight gravity as well. And, you know, all 205 pounds of me that they're going to have to try to lift up if they want to posture up out of my guard. And if I can get them to want to posture up, my goal is to catch them in that that halfway point between being fully postured up and fully broken down. So then I can take advantage of that momentum and use it to to sweep or open up for submission or, you know, find an angle where I can advance my position to some sort of sub or sweep. I guess I just said that. But, uh, you know, I like to control their movement until I can get them to want to move in a way that I want them to move so I can take advantage of it. Speaker 1: The other thing too with, uh, closed guard is because you're trying to restrict their movement, that can be a good way to defeat someone who is maybe faster or or more athletic than you. If you are able to keep them in your closed guard, then you can deny them the ability to rely on a lot of those advantages they might have. Like you said, you talked earlier about loose passing, right? It's going to be real hard for them to use fluidity and motion and speed to pass your guard if you've got them clamped down in closed guard and they can't get out. I liked that part that you said though, Mike, about again, making them carry your weight. And I understand this from top perspective. I mean, if I am in your closed guard, I understand how I could lean on you without giving you my center of gravity to make you carry my weight. How do you do that on the bottom? So you're the person on bottom, how do you make them carry your weight when you are beneath them physically? Speaker 2: Well, I mean, there's a couple different ways, and you really have to understand how to use your hips underneath somebody, right? So, for example, let's talk about how to make somebody carry my weight when I have broken them down, and then carry my weight when they're trying to stand up. Because there's one really good way to break and pass a closed guard is to stand. Okay? There there's a lot of people who only pass guard from their feet. And so they're only, their first goal is to regain their posture and stand up. But let's start with when somebody is broken down, okay? So when somebody's broken down in your closed guard, their head is usually close to your chest, and you have access to clamps, you know, maybe overhooks and clamps on their arms and shoulders. So, I often use, I like to use a lot of no-gi grips when I'm doing my closed guard, even in the gi, because there's often slack in the gi that they can take advantage of, and I might not be able to really keep them broken down as much as I'd like. So I'll use a collar tie on the head, right? And collar tie on the head, and I also like an overhook on one of the arms. And I want to hang off of them, not just squeeze, right? So I will, my hips are going to be active when I'm underneath them, and I kind of will curl them my hips up toward me, uh, the same little trick I use when I'm inside someone's closed guard to get my posture and maintain my base. I'll do the same thing underneath them with that collar tie and that overhook clamp on one of their arms, and curl my hips up and kind of hang underneath them. So, they're not just dealing with my squeeze, they're dealing with trying to lift my whole body up. And I try to do that like on their, when I do a collar tie, I'm really hanging off the end of the lever, right? So their spine is the is the lever, and I don't want to hang like in the middle of it, like between their shoulder blades. I want to hang the end off the end of it because that makes me feel heavier. And then there's another thing you can do with your base and weight distribution. If they're starting to come up from that, I like to open my closed guard while keeping my knees pinched, right? Or I won't even fully open it. I will open it on the side opposite my overhook, right? So if I've collar tied with my right hand, overhook with the left, legs crossed, we're not on video. If your viewers could see me, I'm doing this in my computer chair. Like I'm demonstrating it as I do it. My brain can't disentangle the words and the motion, right? So, collar tie right hand, overhook left hand, legs crossed, they're starting to posture up, even though I'm hanging off them. I'm going to take, I'm going to open my closed guard, and I'm going to take my right foot, which is the one that is my collar tie hand. I'm going to plant it on the ground. I'm going to keep my left foot hooked over their back, right? As they're coming up, I'm going to drive my right foot into the ground, which is going to drive my left shoulder into the ground. The right foot equals the left shoulder. That's going to drive my weight down, make me even heavier and make it harder for them to get up. So, that's how I'm going to make them carry me from underneath, right? I've got to create these connections, usually with a collar tie and an overhook, and, uh, hang off them. And if that's not doing it, if they have a strength advantage, younger, bigger, stronger, happens a lot when you get older, then I create base off of the mat and make my shoulder opposite shoulder heavy, and it's even harder for them to pick me up. Speaker 1: So, this all raises an interesting philosophical question, which is, is it still closed guard if you open your legs? And I bring this up because I think many beginners when they hear about closed guard and they see people play it, they think the objective is to keep their ankles crossed behind the person's back and keep their legs closed, and they're kind of afraid to open their legs because they feel like, well, if I uncross my ankles, then I've given up closed guard. I had this problem when I was a a white belt and a blue belt. I would sort of cling there and I would refuse to open my ankles because I felt like I was kind of giving up the position if I did. But then at one point, you know, a a black belt walked by and pointed out to me, Steve, basically any move that you're going to want to do from closed guard, you have to open your legs eventually at some point, right? Closed guard doesn't mean you close your guard and cross your ankles forever. It's just part of a a position and a strategy you can play. Like if you're on the bottom and you want to armbar someone, you can't do it until you uncross your ankles. If you want to triangle them, it's going to be pretty hard to do that unless at some point you open your legs up. If you want to omoplata them, you got to open your legs up. Most sweeps are going to require you to do that too. So, you can't be afraid of opening your legs, and if you get stuck in that mindset of like, I need to keep my legs crossed at all times, you're probably going to deny yourself the ability to advance that position and play it more effectively. It, um, it's similar to how many people make the mistake with playing when they play mount with thinking that I must never abandon mount no matter what, or I lose. And that's the wrong approach. Like a good mount player will be dismounting, moving from to side control, to knee on belly, back to mount. Like there's no benefit to staying static in mount forever. At some point, the transition and the movement is what gives the technique power, right? Jesse, it's what you've called the paradox of control in the past. Sometimes you have to give up a bit of control to get something better. And I think with closed guard, it is, you bring up a great point, Mike. A lot of the time when you're really starting to attack and and get success with closed guard, you actually open your legs because that's what gives you the ability to hip out and change the angle and do all sorts of interesting stuff. Speaker 2: Right. Jesse and I have had this conversation before, and, you know, we love, Jesse and I love each other, and we like to tease each other, and I, I seem to remember Jesse saying something like, well, closed guard doesn't really exist because you always have to open your legs and do stuff, and that's right. 100% right. Like, but I still consider that position, for me, I just consider that position I described still closed guard. I haven't completely opened. I'm not giving up any of that space, right? I'm not, I'm taking the space up. I'm not creating it. So for me, it's still closed guard, but I could be convinced otherwise too, right? It's just mere semantics at that point in my opinion. Speaker 1: Jesse, you want to argue with Mike about that? Speaker 3: Yeah, let's fight. Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do it. Speaker 3: You know, I really like the way, I think I heard Chris Haueter talk about like, closed guard is when you've got somebody inside your knee line, and open guard is when they're outside your knee line. And I think, I think that's a pretty decent metric. When I am teaching and talking about closed guard, I really do mostly define it both in knee line and ankles crossing for that very purpose. And, you know, there are a couple things in this may start getting us talking about top side of closed guard. So hopefully that's okay, but, you know, one of the things that I, I tell folks is there's no such thing as passing a closed guard. You cannot pass it. With one exception. I've seen Josh Wentworth basically teleport out of a closed guard without it opening up with his honey badger. Speaker 1: But that's because he's a malnourished little man-child though, right? I mean, unless you weigh like 100 pounds or less, you're not going to be able to do that. Speaker 3: Hi, Josh, we love you. Speaker 2: I love you so much, Josh. You're awesome. Speaker 3: But it's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine that, you know, we talk about passing the, you know, closed guard passes because they're really two different skill sets. There's a skill set about opening a closed guard when you need to pass it, and then there's passing open guard. So when I'm talking about it in a classroom, I'm probably guilty of really defining it by the feet being crossed, but I think when it really comes down to brass tacks, I think it's really more about being able to control posture and keeping them inside your knee line. Speaker 1: That's an extremely well-said definition. I love that. That, uh, we define closed guard as keeping them inside our knee line. I mean, going, if you want to go back to UFC 1 and watch some of Royce Gracie's, uh, fights back then, when he played closed guard, he didn't always have his ankles crossed. Like sometimes the person would be sitting inside his knee line on the ground, and he would be digging his heels into into their back, even kicking them sometimes, right? And we would still consider that closed guard even though his ankles aren't completely crossed. Similarly, there's a variant I like to play if I'm sparring with someone who's just way too big for me to effectively close my guard against them, then instead of trying to cross my ankles behind their back, I'll do something like I'll stomp my legs down on, if they're kneeling on the ground on both legs, I'll stomp my feet down on top of both of their calves. And so in that case, I don't even have my legs up behind their back, but I'm still using my feet to prevent them from getting up easily. So, I think that's a really good explanation. It's less about, hey, do I have my my ankles crossed behind your back, and it's more about, are they inside my knee line? Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that a lot. Is Chris going to disown me as a combat base black belt if I say I hadn't heard that before? Because I really like that. Speaker 1: That is really good. Speaker 3: You know, he, I feel like he said it as an aside last time he was at Rough Hands. I think that's the only time I've ever heard him mention it, so I think he'll give you a pass. Speaker 2: Okay, thank God. Good. Speaker 1: I love how all of these OG jiu-jitsu legends, like they will just casually drop some game-changing wisdom just off the cuff, and then they'll completely forget that they said it and it'll never come up again. And then it's just up to people like us to remember it. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: Now it's documented. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: It's official now. Well, Mike, maybe we could flip this around, literally, and and talk about how to attack closed guard. So, when you are the the top player, what do you like to do to escape that situation? Because this is another area where it can be very difficult when you're giving up a lot of athleticism and strength to get out of their closed guard. I mean, I think it's easier to play old bastard closed guard on top than on bottom. But maybe let's just walk through it. How do you like to break open that guard and play that position, pass the guard, while still adhering to those principles that you talked about earlier? Speaker 2: Oh, this is, you're talking my bread and butter here, Steve. This is anytime I'm rolling with somebody and they wrap those legs around me, I feel like you're in my world now. This is my game right here. So that the first thing I you need to do is maintain your posture, okay? Because as we've talked about before, the closed guard player wants to break the top person's posture down so they have access to their neck, their arms, and can unbalance them, right? So we need to keep our posture up and maintain our base. And the key to that is the hip tilt, right? I want to curl my pelvic girdle up like, well, for lack of a better term, like I'm trying to pee on the ceiling, right? And I want to keep my lower back in that position and my hips curled up because that is going to make it really hard for somebody to pull my torso down, okay? And the only way they're going to be able to do that, as long as I stay centered with them, is changing the angle. So I want to curl my hip up, and I want to keep our center lines in line. And if they change angle, I have to adjust with my hips to maintain the angle so I can maintain my posture. This is again something that's a lot easier to show in person than it is to explain on an audio-only podcast. But unless Jesse has a better way of explaining it, because I know that we've talked about this and I taught it at his school, that's how I'm going to explain it. Jesse, you have a better way that I'm open to. Speaker 3: No, I mean, I think that was great. You know, when I know that I've got people that have a yoga practice in their life, I can also talk about the hip tilt that they do in cow positions, but that hip tilting back and forth is really crucial if you are the type of top player that tends to go for posture. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 3: I am not in that camp, but yes. Speaker 2: Correct. Yeah, I know you've got a guard pass that is amazing that I still haven't really gotten good at yet after all these years, but I tend to be the posture player, right? So, I will use that hip to reinforce my posture and get my posture up. And that hip tilt also really puts a lot of pressure on the person's ankles and can often force a guard opening. Depending on who I'm playing against, I don't even do anything special to open a guard. I'll just maintain my posture and wait for them to wear their own ankles out. And eventually, they have to open the guard to do something to me, and that's when I initiate my pass. So, I'll get my posture, maintain that hip tilt, get them to open their guard, sometimes just by waiting it out because their ankles get tired and they get frustrated that that they can't get me broken down, and that's when I pass. And as soon as those ankles pop open, I'm framing on legs so they don't get reclosed. I'm putting weight down on their hips so they can't move their hips, and then I start to pass. And I'm definitely a pressure passer, so I like to get chest over chest, and shout out to Josh McKinney who really turned us on in the past year or so to a lot of chest over chest passing. And I'll get chest over chest and really make them carry my weight. Whatever frames they're putting in front of me, I try to find the angle where those frames can't support me and just let gravity do the work for me. And it's really just a grind. I'm just trying to wear somebody out to where they give up and they can't carry me, and I can get to that chest-to-chest position. So, as the top player, I in a closed guard position, I really love it when people take closed guard because, like I said, that feels like that's my world. If I don't like to talk about how good my jiu-jitsu is because there's always people that's they're better, right? I'm not super athletic. The one thing I'm really confident about is my ability to maintain my posture and maintain my base and make people carry me and wear them out. And so that's super key in dealing with another closed guard player. Speaker 1: Yeah. First of all, I just want to point out, you know, I love a good ecological external coaching cue, and telling people to tilt their hips like they're trying to pee on the ceiling, that's got to be right up there with the best ones I've ever heard. So, good job. Speaker 2: There's a filthier version of it that Haueter uses, but I'm not using that on your show. Speaker 1: Appreciated. Yeah. But there's different ways you can do it, right? Like the goal, as you said, is to make them carry your weight, however you do it. One way is to posture up. Jesse mentioned that he likes to actually posture down. I do the same. I like to posture down and bring my head down because I find if I'm caging their hips at least, I can drop my head and I don't have to worry about things like guillotines or back takes or anything like that as long as I have control of their hips. And then I can start to lean onto them and make them carry my weight. The first time I kind of saw someone do this was actually in the UFC watching George St-Pierre in some of his earlier fights because people used to fight MMA like they would compete in jiu-jitsu. They would do this thing where they would try to pass the guard and get to a better position. But GSP was one of the first people I noticed who didn't do that. He was content to just sit inside someone's guard and just beat them from inside their own guard. And he would do that by standing up and leaning forward onto the person and preventing them from moving their hips so they couldn't armbar or take his back or do anything like that. So, however you choose to do it, whether you choose to posture up or lean forward, the most important thing is you just need them to be carrying your weight. Like you, Mike, I really like it when people try to play closed guard against me because my preferred style is slow pressure. And if someone is playing closed guard, that to me is an indicator that they're not going to try some heavy speed-based game, right? Open guard is a lot more unpredictable. With closed guard, the person is effectively allowing me to hold them where they are. And that means that now I can fight this fight at my pace, which is going to be a lot slower. So, I also like closed guard as well when the person on bottom chooses to play it. And I think a lot of people do, which is maybe why it's become less common over the last while is people tend to focus more on the open styles of guard. Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like there's a, there's a running theme here with us old guys. I'm very much a a pressure passer as well. And there's probably a whole other episode in this, but I'm also a huge fan of malicious compliance. And when I know most people want to break my posture in closed guard, I'm going to give it to them harder and faster and more aggressively than they were expecting. But yeah, I mean, I even find myself at times if I'm having trouble passing someone's open guard just because of athleticism or whatever else, I'll force them to slow it down by just falling into their closed guard. And that works really well for me because, you know, typically when they're playing that aggressive open guard, they don't love the closed guard anyway. So I will absolutely just fall into it and start working my game from there. Speaker 1: I love that point, and that might be controversial, but I sometimes do the same as well. If I am sparring with someone who is a much better guard player than than maybe I am a guard passer, I will go into their closed guard and try to pass from there because I feel like getting in that close allows me to make them carry my weight and allows me to play my pressure game and then get into the type of pass that I want. So, I don't know if that's a winning strategy, but it is something that I like to do. And as people move away from closed guard, putting them into that position often takes them out of their element. And I I find many people, like you said, Jesse, they don't expect someone to get into their closed guard and start pressuring them and giving them what they're looking for, right? If they're trying to break your posture and pull you down, okay, I'll give you all of my posture. Like I will start driving my head right under their chin or as I've seen you do like into the chest, right? And people often expect you to pull back in that situation. They expect you to try to posture up. So when you try to posture in and drive into the person from inside their closed guard, that can really mess people up. It's so, uh, counterintuitive to what they might have thought would happen. Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's something I tell my students all the time. Anytime you can make, and I'll put this in quotation marks because doing jiu-jitsu's not fighting, but anytime you can make a fight look different than what your opponent expects, even if it's just for a moment, you are going to have an advantage. Speaker 1: Yeah. That's actually a big part of the reason why I play turtle so much is because it's not that I think turtle is better than guard or anything, but it is that when I go to turtle, it breaks a lot of people's brains because they have this preconceived script of how a guard pass is supposed to work. And if the person just doesn't play guard and goes to turtle, a lot of the time people kind of get taken out of the script in their head that they're trying to play by. And I find that gives you the opportunity to do a lot of things that they might not have expected and to play that position more aggressively or go back to a guard or even just stand up. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I'm on board with all of that. I feel like somebody who's a a good open guard player usually has a lot more speed and athleticism than I have. And I love that I'm hearing you both say that because I feel validated now in some of my rolling strategy. I'll do the same thing. I'll like put myself in their closed guard. That allows me all the connections that I need to really punish them for getting that close to me. So, yeah, I love it. Speaker 1: Well, also, as we get older and fatter, it gets harder for our training partners to close their guards around us, right? So, Speaker 2: It's my favorite jiu-jitsu technique. Speaker 1: That is true. Speaker 2: Gaining weight. But as somebody who still likes to compete, I learned this past Master Worlds that I don't want to go up a weight class. Those boys are big. I want to go back down to heavy and not super heavy. So, I'll gladly be small enough to let them put their legs around me. Speaker 1: Well, I guess, Mike, Jesse, any closing thoughts or closing tips on this particular style of playing guard? Anything we didn't talk about yet that we want to share? Speaker 3: No, I mean, I think hopefully what folks have gotten out of this is that there are often ways to adapt most, if not all of jiu-jitsu to work with you and your body and your limitations and your attributes and your age, but it may take some experimentation and trying some different things out and not always listening to whatever the experts or whatever's working well in competition. You know, there you may have to blaze some of the trail yourself, but in doing so, often you can yield a lot of gold. So I would encourage people to not just walk away from techniques or or concepts and and try to figure out a way to own it themselves. Speaker 2: Yeah, I would agree. I would totally agree. And, you know, one thing we didn't cover, I don't want to get into this a lot, but I think we touched on it a little bit. You can always just get up. You don't need to be stuck down in closed guard, right? You you don't need to be stuck down in guard at all. Like if it's not working for you, stand up, stand in base. Like there's ways to do that and reset your position to something that's better. So, you know, you don't have to be stuck with this one way of doing things just because we're talking all about closed guard today. Doesn't mean that any of us are saying that's the only way to play it, right? You don't even have to stay in the bottom. Get up. Speaker 1: I would actually say one of the biggest challenges with being a closed guard player is it's harder to stand up from closed guard than it is from a lot of open guards because you've got the person's body right in the way of your legs, right? And also because you're so close to them, there's the risk they might grab your leg as you get up. So, you can do it, but I would just say if you're trying to stand up from closed guard, you've got to kind of time the opening. You have to make sure that their hands are not in a spot where they can easily grab your leg on the way up. That does become a problem. But yes, absolutely. I think many people are way too married to the idea of getting a sweep from the bottom. Oftentimes, the path of least resistance is just to stand up. And in many situations, you can still get the sweep. If you stand up before they're able to respond, and then you just push them over onto their back, that's two points, right? Even if it's not a a beautiful, gracie-esque, you know, flower sweep, it's still two points if you went from being, I'm on my back and I'm up and now they're on their back. If that was from guard, you get your two points. So, don't think that this is a non-point scoring opportunity. Speaker 3: Yeah, and make sure you act like an old bastard and use them like a piece of furniture when you're getting up. Speaker 2: Exactly. I would disagree about having more difficulty standing up from an open guard because in closed guard, I control the connections, right? I can connect to them how I want to connect to them. In an open guard with more athletic opponent, often they're moving too much for me to connect how I want and keep that space. But that that might be a whole another episode. Either way, you can find a way to get up and then, like Jesse said, they're they're your furniture now. They're your couch. You lounge on them while they try to get out from under you. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well said, well said. I guess one other thing we didn't get a chance to talk about, but I think it's worth pointing out. Back on the topic of like, when do you open your guard? Something that Rob Bernacki, our mutual friend, had once told me was that when you're switching up your grips and your controls, you need to make sure you always have a placeholder grip or a placeholder control. And what he means by that is don't let go of all of your points of control at the same time. The way that I like to think of this is think of climbing a ladder, right? You have to always have one hand on the ladder if you want to climb that thing. You can't let go with both hands at the same time, or you're going to fall off. And when you're trying to advance position in jiu-jitsu, it's the exact same thing. You always need to have some point of control. So, if you are just opening your closed guard without any other point of control, then yes, that's not great because the other person can just stand up or posture up or get away. However, in the example that you brought up earlier, Mike, like if you break the person down and then you get an overhook on them or you're somehow using your arms now to control their posture, then it's okay to let your closed guard go because you have another point of control. But if you open your closed guard and you have nothing else controlling the person, then there's nothing preventing them from just getting up and passing you. So just something to think about, right? You always want to make sure that you have a new point of control before you let go of the old one. Speaker 2: Yes, sir. That Rob Bernacki knows some jiu-jitsu. Speaker 1: He's all right. Speaker 3: A replacement theory that's not a complete crazy conspiracy. How about that? Speaker 1: Oh boy. Well, Mike, if you want to tie this up, if people want to follow you or find you on social media, where can they do that? Speaker 2: Instagram's a great spot. Old Bastard BJJ is my handle. I'm also on Threads. So if you want to find me there, it's all Old Bastard BJJ. Speaker 1: And Mr. Jesse Walker, what about you, sir? If people want to follow you or train with you at your school, where can they find you? Speaker 3: Yeah, you can find us at roughhandsbjj.com, @roughhandsbjj on most, if not all of the socials. And if you're ever in the Louisville, Kentucky area, please come train with us. We love visitors and new students. Speaker 2: Their new location is amazing, by the way. Let me plug that again. Like, Jesse, your new school is top-notch. So, Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 2: Highly recommend coming to visit you. Speaker 1: Fantastic. So, if you want to do a jiu-jitsu/bourbon tour, Rough Hands BJJ in Louisville, Kentucky is probably your best bet. So, I will put links to all of that stuff in the show notes to make it easy for people to find. I'll also put a link to our stuff. Everything lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. I'll also highlight some of the episodes, Mike, that you and I did in the past, and I'll link to those in the show notes too, because I think we expanded and elaborated on them a bit here today. And like I said, we've got courses on this stuff on BJJ Mental Models Premium. So if you want to dig into this in more depth, go to bjjmentalmodels.com and sign up for premium. There's a free trial so you can check it out at no risk. We've got a lot of awesome content for, you know, grapplers who are trying to evolve their game beyond relying on strength, speed, athleticism, and the kind of things that you tend to lose with age. I think we've even got some seminar footage, Mike, of you doing this stuff on premium. So if people want to actually see this, that's the best place to go. And again, I'll put all of that in the show notes, but it all lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. Mike and Jesse, guys, thank you so much. I really had fun with this one. Speaker 3: Thank you. This was a blast. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a great time. Appreciate you guys. Speaker 1: You two, everyone. And of course, I always appreciate everyone listening to us as well. Sincere thank you to you, the listener, and we'll talk to you soon.