The Worst Place

Today’s grappling class was inspired by this article from Mark Mullen (a BJJ black belt).  In the article he talks about 4 the four things he thinks every white belt (beginner) in BJJ should know.  You should read the whole article – even though we only examined a tiny portion of a section of the article titled “the hierarchy of positions”.

In this section he talks about the best and worst positions to be in during a submission grappling match.  The worst position, he contends, is with your belly to the ground and your partner on top of you with their hooks in.  We tried it.  Turns out it’s pretty awful down there.  The second worst position, he continues, is rear mount – when your belly is to the sky and your partner is behind you has their hooks in.  We also tried this position and once again, it’s bad.  (Incidentally, my apologies to the students today as I completely flubbed the names of these positions in class.)

The nice part about knowing what the worst positions are is that it gives you two goals:

1. Put your partner in the worst position possible.
2. Avoid being put in either of these two awful positions.

So class was:

1. Learning and drilling the two worst positions.
2. Learning a rear naked choke from both positions.
3. Adding some resistance from these positions.
4. Live rolling.

Knowledge is power.