What Position?

Got a good question about head and arm position today in grappling class.  I didn’t immediately have a great answer, so we spent most of the class playing in the position and seeing what we could discover.

We worked two submissions from the position: a basic arm bar and the arm triangle.  The reason the arm comes up in both submissions is because it is very easy when you’re on the top in head and arm to separate the arm from the body.  The arm bar is a neat one because you actually lay your shin across their forearm to hyper extend the elbow.  Why is that neat?  Because it’s a slight variation on how the arm bar usually comes up, thus it can help students see that there are a nearly infinite variety of arm bars out there.  The arm triangle crops up when the bottom player keeps their “trapped” arm close to their neck.  This allows the top player to push the arm deeper across and take the choke.

To balance things out, we worked a couple of reversals as well: the kick over and the hook under.  Both reversals involve hooking a foot around and grabbing a hold of your partner.  In the first case, you hook your outside foot over your partner’s head and kick down.  This crops up only if your partner makes the mistake of leaving you enough space to get your leg in there.  In the second reversal, you scootch your hips up to your partner’s hips and then hook your outside heel inside their leg.  From there you can take a rear half guard, push your hips over and reverse the position.  In both of these reversals, you can occasionally catch your own submission – an arm bar in the kick over and an omoplata in the hook under.

Whew.  So hopefully we all walked away (grappled away?) with a bit of a deeper understanding of head and arm position.