I wanted to give you a couple insights from my First Principles Open Guard course that illustrate just how counter-intuitive first principles can be to what we’ve accepted as true…
Both of these are concepts I had not only heard over and over again throughout my journey in Jiu-Jitsu but also things I taught:
1. Ideally when playing open guard we would have four points of contact with our opponent, but for maximum control try to maintain at least 3 while the other hand or leg is in transition.
2. Related to concept #1, when it comes to passing the guard vs. attacking from the open guard, it’s usually a race to see who gets the better grips.
As is usually the case with these things, it’s not that this is “bad” advice because in many contexts these will both work.
However, stripping away all assumptions from things we’ve heard or been taught, past experiences, etc., we can step back and look objectively at what the open guard was really designed to do…
It turns out that fundamentally speaking there are two primary fundamental “orientations” of the open guard, and the primary function of one of them is to maintain distance.
When maintaining distance between you and your opponent is the goal (specifically, keeping your upper torso at a distance that they can’t connect their upper torso), the conventional wisdom about grips and the ideal number of points of contact no longer holds up…
In fact, the first principle turns out to be: the passer’s goal is to get chest to chest connection; the guard player’s goal is to keep the passer falling chest to hips.
And in that particular context, you’ll discover that the ideal number of points of contact shifts from 4 to 2, and often 1 instead of 3 when in transition.
Why? Because in that particular context, the more points of contact you have the physically closer your opponent is by definition to achieving their goal.
Of course, that can change at any moment depending on a number of factors, but my experience now teaching hundreds of students from white to black that once this one change is understood, trained, and implemented into their skill set, it’s like having a whole new dimension open up… One that solves many of the problems you thought you had with the open guard, and for which most practitioners seek answers by learning yet another set of techniques or style of guard.
