SW Portland Martial Arts Blog

If you are trying to get better a martial art that involves working against actively resisting partners, I suggest you become a good adversary. Being a good adversary is fundamentally different from being an enemy to your partners. Enemies drown one another without compunction. Good adversaries create a rising tide that raises all participants. Great adversaries can alter the level of adversity they provide to any partner, and assure that both they and their partner are learning to swim. In this article, I will talk about 7 ways to become a better adversary and avoid becoming an enemy.

First, acknowledge that you are training martial arts and not engaging in a death match. This seems laughable but it is easy to let your adrenaline and your emotions drag you under and switch from being an adversary to becoming an enemy. Some people can get away with this and survive without major injuries. Those people tend to be bigger, younger, and male but that isn’t always true. Many giant, young men end up smashing themselves against the brutal shoals of aggression and hobble away with horrible injuries, never again to return. Plenty of people who are smaller, older, and not male dive into the hurricane of aggression and emerge as quality martial artists. However, it is statistically more likely that if your treat your training like a deathmatch, you’re more likely to get hurt. Don’t become an enemy or transform your partner into an enemy by engaging in a death match. Remember you are training martial arts. Be an adversary.

Second, acknowledge that physical traits matter but don’t rely on them to win matches at your gym. Strength, speed, coordination, height, age, weight, reach, and power can all create advantages in martial arts. Martial arts builds skills. Skills can be enhanced with physical traits. In a boxing match, given two fighters of equal skill but one with a 6 inch longer reach than the other, I’ll put my money on the one with the longer reach every time. Do you know your physical attributes? Do you know how you stack up physically compared to your partner? Make a mental checklist of your attributes and your partner’s attributes. If you outclass your partner, tone down your intensity a bit. If you are 250 pounds, put a fellow 250 pound grappler in side control, and then press your full weight into your partner they are likely to perceive you as an adversary. If you do the same to a 150 pound partner, they are likely to perceive you as an enemy if they aren’t already tapping out or bemoaning broken ribs. Don’t become an enemy or transform your partner into an enemy by being ignorant of physical attributes. Remember physical traits matter. Be an adversary.

Third, acknowledge that rank is not a 100% accurate predictor of who will win. If you outrank someone and believe that you “should” beat them even though you are losing, you are on the path from adversary to enemy. Sometimes you’ll get beat by someone you outrank. Sometimes you’ll beat someone who outranks you. Don’t let attachment to rank get you sucked down into the undertow. Rank matters in your personal journey and yes, should reflect skill levels at the gym but a belt won’t protect you from injury. Don’t turn yourself into an enemy because of a colored piece of cloth around your waist. Be an adversary.

Fourth, beware and cherish the beginner. People who are new have no idea what is going on. They can be unpredictably calm one moment and then drop a tsunami of aggression on you without warning. They can be incredibly dangerous to themselves and their partners. If you are partnered with a newbie, do not use it as an opportunity to take revenge on all the people who have beat you in the past. To do so is to make yourself an enemy to the hapless novice. On the flipside, watch out for crazy moves. Remember that a beginner has no idea what they are doing and might do some unpredictable stuff. Don’t underestimate them, get surprised, get angry, and then become an enemy. Protect yourself, protect the beginner and don’t try and take advantage of the situation and become an enemy. Be an adversary.

Fifth, provide adversity and try to win. The word adversary may seem an odd choice to use when talking about how to act toward a partner but provided you are both training in hopes of learning how to better face challenges in your lives, being a good adversary is exactly what you should be trying to do. This doesn’t mean you should try and win the warmups and crush people beneath your oceanic power when you drill techniques. It means you should, during sparring, provide your partners with an appropriate amount of challenge. Don’t baby your partner or underwhelm them by not trying to win. Don’t become an enemy by disrespectfully babying your partner. Try to win. Be an adversary.

Sixth, when you are partnered with someone of nearly equal physicality and skill, dive in! Assuming you are both healthy and relatively injury free, enjoy those partnerships where it is simple to be a good adversary and just play. Don’t begrudge if they eventually become better than you and don’t gloat if you surpass them. Don’t become an enemy by taking your close matches personally. These close matches are where you will most see your best challenges. Be an adversary.

Seventh, there are some partners you should avoid, until the tides of your relationship change. Don’t assume that everyone is in touch with their physicality or level of aggression. It’s easy to assume that students who are super aggressive and/or strong are aware of the fact. They may or may not be. They may be completely unaware of their own level of intensity. They may think 100% aggro is the correct way to be. It’s not your responsibility to fix them. There are some partners who will view you as an enemy no matter how you treat them. There are some partners who have no idea how to play with smaller or lower ranking students. Avoid these partners on the mat. These kinds of partners will often drive you into becoming an enemy and this feeling can boil over to all your other partnerships and drive your whole training experience down the drain. Be a good adversary by avoiding impossible partners. Try warming up or drilling with these kinds of partners to help build trust and maybe someday in the future you can be good adversaries for one another. Don’t become an enemy by training with impossible partners. Be patient and take time to build an understanding with them. Be an adversary.

Hopefully these seven points are a good introduction into what it means to be a good adversary and not an enemy in the context of sparring. Enemies want to destroy you. Adversaries want to win while at the same time keeping it fun, safe, and respectful. Hopefully this makes it clear why it is to everyone’s advantage that you cultivate the attitude of an adversary rather than that of an enemy. Don’t take the short view of training and become an enemy of your own progress. Be an adversary.

In the case of sparring that is supposed to simulate self defense or street fighting, I think the same arguments still hold. Assuming all students want to keep training over the long haul, they still have to acknowledge physically and skill level. They still have to feather the intensity so that people don’t get broken and yet they still have to try and win so that everyone is facing actual adversity and not getting false sense of competence. Don’t let the goal of your training – self defense and survival – turn you into an enemy. Be an adversary.

I got to teach two classes for MDP camp this year – one about how to escape bottom mount position and one about how to use knee ride. Both classes were about applying groundwork to a self defense situation. The text that follows was the paper handout I gave to all the students who attended the mount escape class.

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In this class, we will be working on confronting the problem of what to do if we end up on the ground in a self defense scenario. Specifically, we will be concentrating on escaping from the bottom mount position.

For clarity, let’s first define what bottom mount position is. Bottom mount is when we are flat on our backs and our partner is on top of us, with their knees outside of our hips. Sometimes, our partner might have their chest on us, mashing their body weight into us, sometimes they might be sitting upright delivering punches and elbows – both of these things are mount. There are, of course, tons of other terrible positions we might end up in but for this class, we will be concentrating only on bottom mount.

For further clarity, we will talk about why bottom mount position is a bad position and why it is a priority to change the position as opposed to strike or defend against strikes (we may still strike and defend but changing the position is the big concern.) Bottom mount is a terrible position for three main reasons: gravity is not on our side, we are constrained severely in our capacity to move, and our partner has the reach to hit us effectively in the head whereas we can not reach to hit our partner’s head. If we try to solve the problem striking at our partner, they are liable to strike at us and they have better targets, gravity, and their hips. If we prioritize defending against our partner’s strikes, then our situation will, at best, not deteriorate. Therefore, if we want to confront the problem of being in bottom mount, we must improve our position.

For ease of communication, we will be breaking the learning up into a three part steps. Those three steps are: technique, drilling, and play. The technique step will involve learning the pieces that make up the move – there should be no competition or fighting during this step. The drilling step involves some specific defense from our partner – they do a specific thing so that we can use the technique and see both the when and where of one possible application. The last step, play is where we try to apply the technique against an actively resisting partner – we may find that we have to change the technique radically or even use a different technique based on how our partner attacks.

To help build competency, we will be focusing on only two techniques so that (hopefully) in an hour long class, everyone can feel like they’ve had all their questions answered and they (at least) can do the techniques against a non-resisting partner. Reasonable competency (which we will define here as the ability to escape from bottom mount against a fully resisting, untrained person who weighs up to 10% more than you) groundwork typically takes between 6 months and a year of twice a week training.

The first technique we will learn will probably be familiar to many in the MDP community – the bridge and roll. We will break the bridge and roll down into 5 steps: bring your feet to your hips, block the foot, block the hand, bridge, and roll. Bringing the feet up to the hips gives you maximum leverage. Blocking the foot and hand will help prevent your partner reaching out a limb and stopping the roll. Bridging will life your partner up, making them easier to roll. Rolling will put you in top guard – thus improving your position.

The bridge and roll is a great technique but, like all techniques, doesn’t work if someone counters correctly, or if your timing is off, or if your partner is massively bigger (double your weight is a reasonable limit) than you. For all these reasons, when we first learn the technique, or any technique, it is helpful to do it against minimal resistance. Communicate clearly! If your partner resists, remind them that we are doing technique work and them resisting is going to hamper your learning.

The second technique to escape mount that we will learn is called the elbow escape. This more complex movement involves seven steps: keep your elbows down, roll 45 degrees over to one side, reach across their leg with your far foot, drag their leg over your close leg, pop your knee through, rotate 90 degrees over to your opposite side, take the underhook, and then use your free arm to frame. Keeping your elbows down stops the position from getting worse (high mount). Rolling over 45 degrees sets you up so you can reach their leg easier. Reaching across undermines their base. Dragging their leg over limits their movement options and sets you up to move to half guard. Rotating over to the other side makes it harder for them to smash you down. The underhook and the free arm frame both make you even harder to smash down and at this point, you are in bottom half guard, an improved position.

As with the first technique, communicate clearly with your partner while drilling. There should be no resistance while you are first learning. Your partner will need to still have some structure to their body so that you can move but they shouldn’t be fighting you. If one person improves, their new skills will help the whole community improve. As the cliche goes – iron sharpens iron.

Once we’ve got both techniques, we will work a drill concentrating on two specific scenarios – what to do if our partner’s knees are tight or loose? In the drill, our partner will feed us one of two options – are they squeezing us tight with their knees or are they relatively loose with their knees? If they are tight, we will do the bridge and roll. If they are loose, we will do the elbow escape.

For those who have seen both these techniques before and have a decent level of competency in groundwork, we will go over how to stand up from top guard (if you used the bridge and roll) and how to sweep from bottom half guard (if you used the elbow escape) – because our original goal, in this self defense situation, is to stand back up to our feet.

At that point, we will have done technique and rolls so we will finish the class with the last step – play. Partner’s will start in mount position. The partner on the bottom will try to escape. The partner on top will try to pin. The game will be over if either partner taps or if the bottom partner escapes to standing. The game can be modified in many ways – so communicate clearly with your partner. Consider competency, size difference, and injury when deciding how hard you and your partner should play. It is also completely fine to stick with the previous drill rather than escalate to play. For those who want the full self defense feel, they can add strikes as well.

Thanks for the opportunity to teach at camp! I love questions and feedback. Please send me your thoughts or just come ask me. If you want to get better at groundwork, check our BJJ schedule at Southwest Portland Martial Arts – all enrolled MDP students can attend those classes that concentrate on groundwork at no charge.