the other day I was reminiscing about nonsensical things I used to do as a white belt and also realizing there's a lot of common ground between what I used to do and what I'm seeing from the current white belts of today so today's video we're going over some of these silly things we used to do or still do as white belts and easy ways to fix them so that your game can be immediately more effective let's jump [Music] in most if not all of these tips are coming from my white belt days as a competitor
I remember feeling very confused and not really knowing how to progress a lot of these situations the Common Ground here is that I see a lot of white belts of today doing these same things we've got a lot of easy fixes I want to fly right through them jumping right into the first one randomly tugging on your opponent's lapel while they're in your guard as you can see here I've got my brother helping me out in today's video he's a black belt training for 11 years so he's a great asset to have as we set
up the example he's in my guard you can see me randomly pulling on his lapel not really knowing what to do this is something that you see a lot of white belts do just from Pure confusion so instead of randomly pulling on the lapel because as you can see it's fairly easy to resist that if I'm not breaking his posture first I'm going to begin to set up an armar by grabbing one side I like to grab on my right side I get two on one which means I get two hands on one wrist making
this a much more strong and effective approach I force that hand over to the left side of my hip at the same time grabbing onto the back of his neck as I do this I place my right foot on his hip and I swivel my left leg up into his armpit as you can see I'm setting up an arm bar as some of you white belts May recognize now some of you newbies might not recognize this and that's okay I swing my right leg over replacing my hand that's on the neck getting a two-on-one grip
again on the arm that's isolated between my legs pinching my knees together and hipping into his elbow joint at the same time pulling my heels to my hamstrings I found that doing all of this at once pinching the knees together heels to the hamstrings and hipping in was a little bit difficult to learn in the beginning but once you get this down and you can do all of these movements at once it makes the armar very effective very tight and very hard to resist keep in mind most white belts try to force submissions without any
kind of a setup and that's really where you start to see the difference between a white belt and a blue belt even in a purple and Beyond you start setting up your submissions as you become more advanced submissions are just like take Downs a lot of times I'm not going to be able to just randomly shoot a double Leg Takedown on an opponent they're going to see it coming a mile away we have to set these things up and that's exactly what we can do by pulling on the lapel one or two really good strong
pulls can get a guy off balance it can jolt his brain a little bit thus setting us up an opening to hit an arm bar I'm never going to tell you to go straight into the submission without setting it up unless your opponent is just super tired and giving it to you most of the time you're going to need a setup pulling on the lapel to just pull on the lapel isn't going to get you any anywhere you make it nice and aggressive and you move into something else like an armar well now we're talking
as you can see in this next example instead of just pulling on his lapel one hand goes on his inside lapel one hand goes on his elbow I pull and open at the same time while also bringing my knees to my chest thus effectively breaking down his posture and as you can see I'm moving into a kamora attempt one of my favorite things about koras is that once you know what you're looking for you start seeing opportunities for them everywhere in this situation with this kamora I'm using two of my arms to isolate one of
his and I've got my legs wrapped around his waist and guard which isolates his body in place thus allowing me in a twisting motion to apply a lot of pressure to his shoulder if you're brand new there's a chance this is your first time seeing the kamora I would highly recommend you go nice and slow on this this submission is the real deal it can cause major damage to your opponent's shoulder so you want to be a good training partner go nice and slow not only for their sake but that also helps you learn the
move a bit better when it's the first time you're seeing it all right next up an easy guard break one of my biggest struggles when I was a white belt was breaking open someone's guard I was athletic I was strong I was explosive so even if I were to break open the guard my opponent would go into open guard or spider guard or some other variation of an open guard and would submit me or would sweep me this was something that I struggled with for a long time and it's just because I didn't know any
better this right here is a nice easy guard break that keeps you in a safe spot as you see here I'm placing my hands just above his belt you can even go right on top of the belt bracing into his stomach I'm going to place that right knee into his tailbone when I step back with my other leg and I round my back out and his guard breaks all my weight is back and I'm a little bit further away from him which is nice and safe for me I don't have to worry about a lot
of his attacks because of the distance I've created but I'm still close enough to affect a guard pass some guys will even attack the legs from here I will admit that I love to do that even though it does feel a little bit cheap because it's just so easy but if it's low hanging fruit I'm probably going to go for it but on the flip side if your opponent's going to give you low hanging fruit there's no reason why you shouldn't go for it Jiu-Jitsu isn't about what you can force it's about taking what your
opponent gives you all right next up randomly tugging on the lapel from the standing position I'll never forget my first tournament is a white belt all my opponents felt very purposeful with their ghee grips every location that they grabbed on to felt like there was a good reason for it well in my mind I was just weathering the storm I may have been grabbing his lapels and his sleep Lees but I had no idea what to do from there there's actually a lot you can do from this position especially if you have inside control which
you should always be aiming for one of my favorites is the collar Dr takedown I find that a lot of white belts will just grab the lapels straight in front of them like this left hand on the opponent's right lapel right hand on the opponent's left lapel well as you can see here I'm going to move my right hand over to the left side and I'm going to take my left hand and grab his right sleeve just by switching my grips to this position I have a lot more pulling leverage when it comes comes to
effectively getting him to the ground what I like to do is as I pull him towards me I step out of the way and sit to my right hip sticking my right leg out in front of his leg so he has something to trip over as his weight carries him forward I'm going to leave my hands on his ghee cuz as his weight goes down I'm using that to carry my weight up into the neon belly position I find this to be one of the easiest takedowns to hit especially in tournaments it's very low risk
High reward if you don't know double EGS why would you shoot a double egg if you don't know single legs you don't have that perfected why are you even trying that in a tournament do something that's a little bit easier a little more cost effective when it comes to energy consumption and something that's not so high risk you know if you mess this up you're not in a position to get guillotined so I think it's a win- win if there's anything I would recommend you getting good at as a white belt get good at this
takedown another side tip I can give you when your opponent grabs onto your lepel or your sleeve you need to address that immediately if someone's grabbing your clothing or they're grabbing your ghee you you have to assume that they're setting up some kind of a takedown all right I don't let people hold on to my ghee I don't let people hold on to my sleeves I immediately address these I'll get two hands on one and I'll strip that grip when your opponent grabs under your ghee from the standing position your alarm should be going off
this is not a place to get comfy this is not a place to rest this is a time to act get those grips off your ghee it's going to put you in a much better place to see more victory in this next example Brian's showing some of his favorites from this position one of those being a leg sweep variation and the other being a double Leg Takedown first off let's jump into the leg sweep variation as you can see here he grabs onto my left side lapel which is his right side and he grabs my
ghee just above my elbow what he's going to do is he's going to open my arm up as he straightens my posture up he's getting my weight above my hips as he opens my arm up he's also forcing me to stand up a little bit taller thus raising my center of gravity he steps in with his outside leg getting his hips almost level with mine using his inside leg to sweep my inside leg while also maintaining top control with his grips forcing me to the ground when you do this one right it is so demeaning
because there's very little you can do to stop yourself from going down and remember just like any takedown this is going to require some kind of a setup you're not going to be able to come out of the gate and hit this without doing something to put yourself in a position of Advantage unless the guy is really tired so whether you're pushing and pulling or you're snapping down before you're opening up you have to do something to getting close enough to hit this otherwise your opponent is just probably going to stiff arm you and keep
you at Bay so set it up and enjoy the success of your takeown and I just want to take a quick second to give my sponsor X Marshall a shout out X Marshall does more for the community than any other brand out there they sponsor over 300 athletes of all levels and they even work with kids to help them on their martial arts Journey they've given away over $10,000 in gear in 2023 so if you want to look as good as me and probably even better get over to X Marshall now and start your shopping
they're always running some kind of a deal you can also use my discount code Iron Will to save yourself some money all right all right well I think that covers it let's jump back to the video next up is his double leg variation from this position I really like this one because it comes with the setup built in now if you've never wrestled and you try to shoot a double leg you probably know how tough these are and if you wrestled you probably know how good it feels to hit a solid double Leg Takedown after
a beautiful setup that's exactly what this is you're going to see that he's getting the same exact grips as he did in the leg sweep variation along with elevating me and getting my center of gravity up you really want to exaggerate how much you're opening up and getting your opponent to stand up straight and the second you've got your opponent in that upright position you're going to drop your level and shoot that double leg notice that when he does this he keeps his head up in a safe position he's also using his outside leg to
wrap behind my outside leg making this even more effective not only does that leg wrap make it more difficult for me to sprawl it makes it much more difficult for me to regain my guard keeping him in a much safer position I think if you practice these two enough you'll really come to enjoy them as they are very effective next up on the series of randomly tugging on the lapel from standing instead of doing that we're going to hit a duck under you see that I obtain control of his outside wrist with my outside hand
in this example I am using my opponent's sleeve for control but you can do this with a C clamp on the wrist or even if you're fully locked in with your opponent once I have his sleeve or wrist under control you're going to see I'm going to do a quick snap down to get him off balance and then I'm going to exaggerating throw his arm up as I kneel down with my inside leg as close to his foot as I can in allinone motion I'm throwing hand past my head as I get my head past
his armpit I'm stepping up with my outside leg turning the corner and taking the back for you wrestlers that transitioned into Jiu-Jitsu I think that you'll find these to feel like home while the rest of you who have never done these before it's going to feel very awkward and foreign but this is another one I would consider to be lowrisk high reward so it's worth its time it's worth the effort in learning it you don't see a lot of guys getting stuck in a bad position if they mess the duck under up you either get
get past and get to the back or you don't you're still standing neutral facing each other one thing I really enjoy about the duck under is that it doesn't require a lot of energy a lot of other takedowns require you to lift your opponent's body weight a little bit and if you're not conditioned for that that can be very energy consuming Instead This one you're ducking under his body weight turning the corner and getting to his back it's a great place to be it doesn't take a lot of energy and like I said you're nice
and safe there if you already know the duck under from wrestling and you're not using it in your Jiu-Jitsu game I highly recommend that you add that into your repertoire and if you don't know the duck under trust me when I say it's worth the time it takes to learn this one my whole goal with this video was not to show you how to do a triangle or how to do an armar it was to show you these positions that we get ourselves stuck in as brand new white belts where we don't know how to
advance the situation so obviously this is something that comes with time and experience if you're brand new this is probably happening to you everywhere in Jiu-Jitsu don't stress that's completely nor normal you know if you're coming up in your blue belt you're probably starting to come out of this right you have a good understanding of what you need to do in all the basic situations all the basic positions but that comes with time that comes with practice and I think videos like this have a lot of value because people who are just joining people are
just starting you know unless you have had that class you're pretty much lost right until you have that guidance your loss so I want to put out as much guidance as I can and uh I know that this could have helped me as a wife so as much as it would have helped me I hope it helps you and if you guys had any weird silly nonsensical habits that you used to do as a white belt that are easily fixable drop them in the comments you guys would be surprised how many white belts come through
here gaining knowledge and experience from your guys' comments it helps more than you realize and with that let's close out the video you guys that watch all the way to the end I appreciate you guys sometimes backwards always forwards I'll see you in the next one
