I recently came across a fantastic site while doing some research on Emily Kwok. Emily Kwok is one of the top ten women in Brazilian jiu jitsu and she boasts an impressive resume of titles. A post on lalalandcreative.com states that “Emily Kwok Emily Kwok is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner, instructor, competitor and mentor. She is the first female Black Belt in Canada, the first Black Belt from Canada to have ever won a World Championship title, and co-creator of the highly acclaimed DVD, How to Defeat the Bigger, Stronger Opponent with Stephan Kesting. Born to a Japanese mother and Chinese father in Aomori, Japan, her family immigrated to Canada in the early eighties where she was raised in the Greater Vancouver area.” While I was reading her bio and impressive jiu jitsu resume I came across the site grapplearts.com. This is a site you should definitely bookmark for your pleasure reading. What’s even more impressive is that the creator of grapple arts shares his encyclopedic knowledge of jiu jitsu, a lot of it, for free. Yep. That’s what I said. Free ninety nine. Free. Now the question is just how good is his knowledge? Well you should check for yourself. I down loaded a copy of his “resources for beginning BJJ” and was quite impressed that this e-book could be downloaded for nothing. Yep, that’s free. I am going to share some of what he talks about right here on this post. It’s free. I will continue to reference him from time to time because his instruction is of the utmost quality. Check it our for yourself.
I definitely want to plug Stephan Kesting’s site www.grapplearts.com. You can sign up for the Grapple tip newsletter, find amazing instructional DVDs like Emily Kwok and Stephan Kestings’ “How to defeat the Bigger, Stronger Opponent with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.” Who wouldn’t want to know this especially if you are are woman. More than likely you’re opponent on the street is going to be bigger and stronger. You’ll also find article and interviews, grappling, BJJ and MMA techniques, the grappling tips column, and featured grappling, BJJ and MMA photos. This is a great resources for any jiu jitsu enthusiast. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Position before submission. I have heard this many times and in the beginning was quite confused. Isn’t my job to submit my opponent? Why is position important and why position before submission? Well read on. The following is courtesy of Stephen Kestings’ Resources for Beginning Jiu Jitsu.
At its core, BJJ is a positional game. You often hear instructors tell their students that “position comes before submission”. This is a shorthand way of saying that you should try to get to a good position before going for a submission, that you shouldn’t give up a good position to go for a dubious submission, and that a new student should first concentrate on learning good positional skills.
Putting position before submission is good advice, both when you’re learning the art, and also when you’re actually rolling around on the mats with someone. Learn the primary positions first, and then try to figure out which submissions work best from each position, rather than learning a whole bunch of cool submissions and then trying to figure out where and when to apply them.
It is true that there are a few chokes, armlocks and leglocks you can do from inferior bottom positions, but these aren’t successful very often. The sad truth is that if you’re in an inferior position then you have far fewer and (less effective) attacks available to you than does your opponent, so he will probably win the battle if you start trading submission attempts. If you are in a bad position, first work on improving your position by getting to the top or at least by putting your opponent into the Guard. By doing one of these two things you significantly reduce the odds that your opponent will submit you, and hugely increase the number of offensive options available to you.
So that’s why we must learn to train position before submission.
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