In this article we go over the the basic positions and submissions used in bJJ. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has seen ever-accelerating global growth in the past decade, spreading from Rio de Janeiro to Vancouver and beyond. Equal parts sport and ever-evolving martial art, BJJ requires familiarity with a wide array of specific positions, movements, and submission techniques to stay competitive. Due to this, beginners in BJJ often feel overwhelmed by the amount of fundamental information necessary to become competent grapplers. Such fundamentals are consistently displayed by competitors in every level of grappling and mixed-martial arts competition, transcending time, trendy techniques, and even belt colour. While it is tough to entirely quantify the basics of BJJ, we nevertheless have selected the most common, important positions and submissions for new students of the art to focus on.
Basic Positions In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: and Overview
Some of the basic positions you will see in any reputable Vancouver BJJ gym are the closed guard, half-guard, side mount, full mount, back mount, and front headlock, as well as the standup position that typically begins all competitions and fights. Understanding how to attack, defend, and advance position from these fundamental BJJ positions forms the core of any solid BJJ foundation. The submissions we discuss in the second half of the article are all available from one or more of these basic positions.
The Most Common Beginner’s Battle In BJJ: Closed Guard
The closed guard is likely the most common defensive position you will encounter in BJJ as a beginning BJJ student. Although there are near-endless variations of the guard, most beginners instinctively find themselves in closed guard, with the bottom player’s legs closed and locked around the top player’s waist. The simplicity of technique and relative lack of flexibility required to enter the basic position help the closed guard offer security to most BJJ beginners. A great way to learn the fundamentals of breaking posture, you can employ both your legs and arms to control your opponent, keep them off balance, and maintain distance.
Closed guard also offers a number of submissions — such as the armbar, triangle, and omoplata — to the bottom player. For the top player, opening your opponent’s legs and passing their closed guard is the first challenge to overcome in advancing top position to reach a better point of control such as side mount, full mount, and back mount.
Advancing Position: The Half Guard
Half-guard — whereby the bottom player has trapped just one of the top player’s legs within their own — is the next major position beginners must learn. It is critical for both players to understand this position, as although half-guard is technically a step towards superior position for the person on top, the bottom player has a massive arsenal of sweeps and crafty submissions at their disposal, most of which are not readily available from the previously discussed full-guard. Demian Maia, one of the most decorated grapplers on the planet, routinely uses the bottom half-guard position in MMA as a means of sweeping his opponent.
The First Position of Control: Side Mount
As the top player, once you have successfully passed the half-guard you will typically find yourself in side-mount. Common in other grappling arts such as wrestling and judo, the side mount affords you both the opportunity for stifling control as well as submissions such as the armbar, kimura, and americana. For the bottom player, side-mount will force you to dial in your defense and escapes, keeping your limbs in tight and working to resecure some form of guard.
Survival: The Full Mount
Should the top player continue to advance position, they will generally enter the full mount. Full mount is an aggressive position of control for both BJJ and full-contact fights, offering a number of submission options and — in the case of the latter — the ability to freely punch your opponent in the face.
For the bottom player, surviving and escaping the mount is crucial for both competition and self-defense, a critical foundational aspect of all beginner BJJ programs.
Worst-Case Scenario: Back Mount
From full mount, your attempts to finish your opponent will often force them to turn over and reveal a path to their back — the most dominant position you can secure. Taking the back is a great way to advance position, score points, and put your opponent in an incredibly difficult spot. There are several ways to attack from back mount, including one of the most decisive, high-percentage finishes in all of martial arts: the rear naked choke.
Surviving choke attempts and escaping back mount are crucial aspects of all beginning BJJ curriculums. The back mount is about the worst position you can be in as the bottom player — you have no avenues of attack and your defense must be near-flawless. On the upside, finding yourself in back mount forces you to develop the ability to defend yourself, ultimately escaping your way back to a neutral position and attempting your own guard-passing, mount, and back-take techniques.
The Endpoint of Scrambles: Front Headlock
The front headlock is another common position even untrained individuals are likely to encounter in a grappling scenario. If you attempt a takedown on your opponent from a standing position, or scramble to escape from the bottom, you are quite liable to find yourself in the front headlock. For the top player, the front headlock offers a massive arsenal of chokes, including the guillotine, d’arce, and their many variations. Additionally, taking the back from front headlock is a tremendously effective way to advance your top position.
For the bottom player, the front headlock can offer some surprisingly aggressive wrestling techniques such as the hip-heist, as well as both single and double-leg takedown options. Surviving, advancing and recovering position from the bottom front headlock is vital for BJJ competition at all levels, in addition to being crucial for self-defense and MMA.
The Universal Starting Point: Neutral Stand-up Position
While Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu focuses primarily on ground fighting, nearly every BJJ match, MMA fight, or street altercation starts from the neutral standing position. The intricacies of standup grappling — largely the domain of wrestling and judo — must be understood by BJJ players all the same. A firm grasp of footwork, grip fighting, tie-ups, guard-pulls, and the common takedowns are imperative in order to have a well-rounded grasp of basic BJJ for competition and self-defense.
Fundamental Submissions
A properly applied submission can be the final stage of any BJJ match, roll, or fight. While most beginners are eager to learn submissions and begin tapping people out, the unfortunate truth is that there is nothing basic about finishing any submission. Submitting a reasonably trained opponent with any particular attack is, in and of itself, an advanced proposition with many intricate factors. Submissions that seem simple, such as the rear naked choke, require a number of detailed steps to consistently finish trained opponents who know how to stay calm, avoid mistakes, employ basic defensive maneuvers.
Nevertheless, as a new BJJ player, you will begin learning submissions early into your training career. While there is nothing wrong with attempting submissions using your newfound knowledge, the true first step toward ‘learning’ submissions is understanding how to survive and defend them.
Given that most of your training partners will be more skilled than you for some time, you are far more likely to end up on the worse end of the positions we discussed for much of your early time on the mats. As such, you will have plenty of opportunities to learn how to defend submissions long before you have the chance to apply them offensively.
While the list of submissions and their variations in BJJ is vast, there are a handful of common submissions viable from the positions mentioned above that you must learn how to defend and utilize in order to build a solid BJJ foundation. Among the moves you must become familiar with are armbars from the top and bottom positions, the key-lock attacks such as the kimura and americana, the rear naked choke, triangle choke, and guillotine.
Armbars from Top and Bottom In BJJ
The armbar can be reliably applied from both the guard and mount positions, and is among the earliest submissions a beginner will be exposed to. The finishing details may vary greatly depending on the specific position and style of each player, but the mechanics of the armbar are fairly universal: the attacking player isolates and controls an opponent’s arm with their legs, pinching their knees above the elbow and controlling the opponent’s wrist with their hands. Pressure is applied to either the back of the head or the face (depending on the position), using the calves, shins, and thighs, to keep the opponent pinned down. The breaking mechanism occurs when the attacker extends the hips, hyperextending the opponent’s elbow using the lower abdominal area as a fulcrum.
As a beginner, the first step in understanding how to survive and defend the armbar is by relieving pressure on the elbow, removing the leg from your face to regain posture control, and from there posturing up and pulling your arm out. Understanding the mechanics of the armbar is important for consistently getting these steps right, and any qualified BJJ instructor should be able to competently instruct in them.
Learning the defense and escape sequence from an armbar will make you far more capable when attacking your own armbar submissions, as you will understand the angles and movements your opponent needs to make in order to escape. You can prepare for and anticipate those counters, ignoring useless spazzing or attempts to “muscle out” of the position.
Keylock Attacks: The Kimura and Americana
Another major submission category to be aware of are keylock/figure-four shoulder attacks, specifically the Kimura and Americana. Though these submissions tend to have a lower percentage of success in the long run compared to other attacks, they provide useful opportunities for control and threats to set up other finishes. Their simplicity and availability from a number of positions on both top and bottom warrants their standing as BJJ fundamentals — any BJJ player worth their salt will attack the Kimura or Americana should the opportunity be presented.
The Kimura grip in particular is available from both top and bottom positions, and can be used to escape, reverse position, or get the tap. It involves a figure-four grip on the opponent’s wrist, with one of your hands controlling the opponent’s wrist and the other arm wrapping around the opponents tricep, weaving through to grab your own wrist on the opposite hand. [PIC] This figure-four lock forms a powerful lever to over-rotate the shoulder joint. The opponent must turn their entire body to relieve the pressure, tapping if they cannot continue to turn. Failure to do so will tear the shoulder from its socket, a painful and debilitating injury.
The Americana is similar in concept to the kimura, but is generally only available from top positions. The Americana uses a similar figure-four grip to rotate the shoulder in the opposite direction as the Kimura, to similar effect.
The most important aspect of studying figure-four shoulder locks is knowing how to prevent your opponent from securing the grip. Keeping your elbows tight to your body prevents most opponents from easily securing the figure-four grip, without which it will be nearly impossible to finish the submission. Once you know how to hunt for the figure-four grip, you will be able to snatch should-locks on people who are careless with their elbows and leaving openings for attack.
Bane of the Guard Passer In BJJ: The Triangle Choke
The triangle choke is a head-and-arm choke applied using the attacker’s legs. Performed by sliding a leg over one of your opponent’s shoulders and positioning your calf perpendicular across the opponent’s neck, you then lock the leg down at the ankle with your other knee, trapping one of your opponents arms aside their neck.
Though available from both top and bottom positions, the triangle is most frequently attacked from guard by the bottom player. An incredibly technical move to finish, understanding how to avoid the triangle by keeping ‘both arms in’ or ‘both arms out’ when in the opponent’s guard is the first lesson when it comes to dealing with this submission. You will learn advanced set-ups to attack the triangle as you progress, and will conversely develop more technical means of escaping this dangerous hold the more you practice.
Choking From the Front: The Guillotine
Similar to the rear-naked choke in its instinctiveness and obvious danger, the guillotine choke involves wrapping-up the opponent’s neck with one arm, their head trapped under your chest, with finishing pressure applied under the chin to either the carotid arteries or the windpipe. There are a number of guillotine variations depending on the exact position you find yourself in, but the guillotine is most commonly seen when, during a wrestling engagement, the shooting player exposes their neck through improper head position.
Learning how to shoot safely with good posture and minimal neck exposure is the first step towards avoiding this choke. If you do find yourself wrapped up in a guillotine, your must understand the head and chin angle required for the finish, as well as the hand fighting options to create space in order to survive the choke attempt.
As with all submissions, finishing the guillotine is an art in itself. Without an understanding of how to defend this choke, it will be difficult to submit skilled opponents just by squeezing hard on the head from a front headlock.
The Ultimate Finish In BJJ: The Rear Naked Choke
The rear naked choke is arguably the poster-child finish for any grappling situation. It is effective in BJJ, MMA, and real-world fighting because it allows the attacker to stay almost completely out of harm’s way while cutting off the blood flow to the opponent’s brain. This makes for an incredibly deadly submission that, properly applied, will work on any opponent regardless of size or strength.
The rear naked choke attack occurs from the back mount position, and is the number one priority for the bottom player to defend against once their back is taken. The attacker weaves their arm under the opponent’s chin and grips their own opposite shoulder or bicep. From there, the non-choking hand will push the opponent’s head deeper into the choke, making for a nasty finish. There are several other details, such as head position and rotation of the choke, that can make the difference between an opponent tapping or hanging on, but the general idea is quite intuitive for beginners.
The first defense to the rear naked choke is to protect your neck by controlling the attackers hands, preventing them from wrapping up your neck. The attacking player must be patient in order to secure your neck and the submission, allowing the defender some time to escape. This is an important battle you must become aware of as both the attacker and defender, and is part-and-parcel of understanding the ins-and-outs of the back mount position.
Building Respect Through Mastering BJJ Fundamentals
Learning BJJ is life-long journey, and typically requires years of practice before a solid appreciation of the basics is earned. Luckily, the rewards are also infinite, as grasping each position leads you to better understand the many positions prior and beyond. With the Vancouver martial arts scene rapidly growing, taking the time to focus on the basic positions and submissions detailed above, particularly from survival and escape standpoint, will help grant you the base you need to earn your way forward as a grappler — both in sport, class, and self-defence scenarios.
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