Mini Ep. 96: Direct and Proxy Control

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient Jiu-Jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of Jiu-Jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 2: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I want to spend the next few minutes explaining a concept to you that really helped me rethink the mechanics of Jiu-Jitsu. It's the idea of direct control and proxy control. This is basically how you choose to control your opponent's body. Do you grab their body directly, that's the direct control, or do you control it by a proxy? So a common example of that would be the gi. If I grab you by the lapel, I'm not actually breaking your posture directly by pulling on your body. I'm pulling on fabric that is attached to your body, and by yanking that collar around, I can move the rest of your body as well. So that would be an example of proxy control. Speaker 2: Direct control tends to be a bit more intuitive. When we think of things like guillotine chokes, well, these work through direct control primarily. If I wrap my arms around your neck, I'm controlling it directly, but there are a lot of areas of Jiu-Jitsu where you control your opponent not by directly touching or grabbing the thing you're interested in, but by manipulating something else, something attached to it. Maybe it's another part of your opponent's body or maybe it's the gi. This distinction becomes important because beginners tend to think of Jiu-Jitsu through the lens of direct control. If I want to control something, I grab it. But once you start getting more experienced, you can think in a bit more nuance and you realize there are ways to control your opponent without directly attacking the piece of their body that you're interested in. Speaker 2: So a common example, again, we can go back to the gi and we can think of all sorts of examples where you can control someone by their sleeves, their lapels, their pant legs. Those would all be examples of proxy control, but there are other examples that go beyond just the gi. Let's say I'm trying to hit you with a single leg. Maybe I pick up your near leg and I start either pushing into you and driving you or I start pulling you. Now you're going to have to hop around on that back leg. So even though I'm directly controlling your near leg, I also have a degree of proxy control over your far leg because every time I pull your near leg, you have to hop around on that far leg and that means there's a degree of control that I've got as well. Speaker 2: There's also some interesting examples in evolving areas of the sport like the leg lock game. It used to be that if you wanted to attack someone's leg, the common way to do it would be you would wrap your whole body around that leg. Look at things like classical ankle locks or even heel hooks, and what often happens is you are enclosing that person's leg between your legs. You're wrapping around them like a koala holding onto a tree or a toddler holding onto their dad's leg. Those would be examples of direct control, but more recent evolutions in the leg lock game add things through the lens of proxy control. The Kautera ankle lock, for instance, allows you to control your opponent's knee and hip, not by wrapping your body around them directly, but by putting so much pressure on your opponent's shin that they're forced to the ground and their ability to move their hip and their knee is now compromised. Speaker 2: Another common example of this would be the short Achilles lock, which some people call the trend lock. This is an example of using the shin for leverage, which prevents your opponent from freely moving their knee or their hip. So those are examples of proxy control. Let's talk about the pros and cons of each. Direct control has the benefit of being more intuitive. As I mentioned earlier, it's the lens through which beginners tend to look at Jiu-Jitsu because it just makes so much sense. If I want to attack one of your limbs or your head or even your torso, grabbing it directly is the most intuitive way to do that. Direct control also has the advantage of being tight and snug. If I wrap my arms around a part of your body, it's going to close off the space and take away wiggle room and that's going to allow me to stay connected to you and perhaps even prevent you from moving with a little bit more fine-grained control. Speaker 2: But the downside to direct control is that it's very obvious. If I grab a part of your body, you will assume that my goal is to attack that part of your body and you'll react accordingly. Also, because direct control is tighter, that means it's often more susceptible to strong attempts to break the grip. Because with direct control, I'm grabbing your body directly, there tends not to be a lot of slack and that means that with a strong yank or pull, you might be able to dislodge my grip and free yourself. Proxy control is the opposite. Some of the things that would be considered a weakness of direct control now become a strength and vice versa. Let's flip this around and talk about proxy control. For proxy control, one of the strengths is that it sometimes hides your intentions. If I want to attack one of your legs, but I grab the other, you might misread what I'm attacking. You might misunderstand the target that I'm looking for. Speaker 2: It's not always easy to tell what your opponent plans to do when they're using a proxy control grip. You see this a lot with gi-based maneuvers where think of the loop choke for example. Many of these chokes come from weird situations where your opponent might not think you're directly setting up a loop choke, but if you can pull them into a certain way, then suddenly that becomes viable. So one of the strengths of proxy control is its ability to conceal what your true intent is. One of the downsides of proxy control is that because you are not controlling a body part directly, it makes it a bit easier to move that body part around. If I am wrapping my entire body around your limb, there's at least some degree of space closure that's going to prevent you from moving that limb. If I'm controlling that limb by proxy, whether it be by grabbing the gi fabric or by grabbing another limb and forcing you to move in a way that impacts the proxy controlled limb, in those situations, because I'm not controlling the targeted limb directly, there's more space. Speaker 2: So going back to that example of the single leg, if I'm directly controlling one of your legs for a single, the far leg, I do have proxy control over it, but because my body's not wrapped around that leg, you can still hop around and you have the ability to use that leg. It's compromised, but you do still have the ability to use it. You see similar things with the gi. The gi tends to have a degree of slack to it and if your opponent can create that slack, then those gi grips can become a bit looser and it can be a bit harder to control your opponent directly by that grip. However, the flip side of that is sometimes those loose grips are harder to break. If I grab your lapel and I make it really, really tight, then a strong push or pull could force me to release that grip. But if I have a loose grip on your gi, then when you push or pull, there's more slack and that means that while the grip control might not be as tight, it might be harder for you to break. Speaker 2: So there's an analysis of direct control and proxy control in Jiu-Jitsu. Neither of these options are better. They both have pros and cons, times to use them and times not to, and in many situations you will be using both of them simultaneously. Back to the single leg, you are directly controlling one leg while proxy controlling the other. So these things are not an either or. If you enjoyed this kind of concept, check out BJJ Mental Models. We've got many more like this. We have full-length podcast episodes that go into extreme detail, plus many episodes like this and our newsletter, which are all completely free and you can get them all at BJJmentalmodels.com or you could level up with us and join BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu concept, strategy, tactics, philosophy, and mindset. There's nothing else quite like it and the first week is free. You can find all of this at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you in the next one.