Offense First

Today in grappling class we worked a couple of submissions from the guard – the arm bar and the Kimura.  We worked on getting the right position for them.  We worked on taking up as much space as we could.  We did not work defending against them.

Why no defense?  Get a group of beginners together and have them grapple.  You’ll find that on the whole, nobody can submit anybody else with any degree of consistency.  They all instinctively have some ability to squirm and avoid being put in awful positions.  Teach them defense and the submissions become even less frequent.  Teach them offense and maybe things will start to get interesting.

People have some instinct when it comes to the defensive end of things but little to none when it comes to the offensive side of things.  Thus, it makes some sense to teach a bit more offense at the beginning so that the grappling game can indeed be a game in which someone wins.  This is not to say there isn’t value to rolling for a few minutes with a partner, getting exhausted and having nobody tap.  Those kinds of rolls are fabulous conditioning, are necessary for building an offensive arsenal and often contain many moments of near submissions (or at least dominant position).

So here we are… filling our bag of tricks with offensive moves and to a large extent, as we roll – figuring out some defensive options that maybe started as instinct but develop into something more strategic.