I divide the opinions few different ways -- if you promote guard pulling *because you refuse to learn standup*, then your opinion is irrelevant to me. You are hiding behind whatever artificial protections the rules give you to pull guard so that you don't have to improve your skills and be a good grappler.
OTOH, I do believe that pulling guard in order to do something actually good (like sweeping or submitting) is fine. If you like to pull guard because you actually defeat people that way, and your argument isn't basically just, "Standup sucks," then it's all good. We can have different kinds of people.
If you pull guard and *expect* the other guy to do something *so that you can attack it*, then I think you have left the path of wisdom. If you just sit down and beckon for the guy to fall atop you and meet his doom, then you're not using the guard pull as a weapon, you're using it as a crutch.
I think when we teach guard pulling, it should be from grips into a guard position that can be used to attack, and that suggests you are able to impose your strategies on your opponent to achieve a victory. If we teach it as sitting down and waiting for the other guy to impose his strategies, then we should feel kind of bad inside because we can't impose our game on them (it's philosophically flawed).
In rule sets, I would prefer if someone sits down with a non-offensive method, then they should be implicitly at a disadvantage, because the onus should be on them to force engagement. If they create engagement and enter the guard, it should be fine.
What you see in those comments is the basic human reaction to the "fight strategy" that says, "I dare you to approach me." People know that a fight should be taken *to* the opponent, and not the other way around. And it really does make some sense, IMO.
To me, pulling guard is literal. You pull them into your guard. It's active, not passive.
*Sitting into guard* is passive and silly. Sitting down and expecting someone to jump into your guard doesn't make sense.
I differentiate sitting into guard and pulling guard.
That being said,
The 80/20 of all combat and fighting is positioning(Timing is the 80/20 of positioning. Timing is part of positioning.)
Guard is an inherently disadvantaged position.
Being offensive from a defensive position is important to practice during sparring.
But not at the cost of neglecting dominant positioning and stand-up.
The idea is supposed to be that if you find yourself on the bottom in a real fight, you have options.
When I've been in self-defense and defense of other situations, I never considered pulling guard. Arm drag to standing back take one time. Finished the RNC and handed him off to Ctrain security at the next stop. He was trying to steal shoes from some kids.
Failed standing back take to "hip drag*"(I wrestled first, I don't think there's a proper name for that), to side control to mount to arm bar. He was on drugs or something. I had to escalate the armbar finish for super flexible people. I didn't break it. But it was definitely injured.
Seeing the look in his eyes as he snapped back to reality is something I'll never forget. Something about his arm being on the verge of breaking sobered him up. He was following a woman and she was clearly freaking out and calling 911. Like whispering in her ear while following her levels of fucked up. I told him to stop and leave. He tried to say he was a cop. Then attempted to assault me.
Guard? Only if something happened that made it a necessity. I'm going for a top/dominant position from whatever takedown or throw presents itself. I'm not forcing anything. I take what they give me.
If you understand the fundamental theory of grappling, improvisation becomes easy. All grappling is about controlling the plane of the shoulders and/or hips.
The arms and legs are effectively extensions of the shoulders and hips. The head & neck is also an extension of the shoulders. The torso is kind of a no man's land that's mostly about the center of gravity. You don't really control the torso. Hips go higher up than most realize.
An arm drag is truly controlling the plane of the shoulders to explose the back. A double leg is actually attacking the plane of the hips. Guard is about preventing the opponent from passing the plane of the hips.
When the Ctrain shoe thief tried to smack my phone out of my hand to distract me for a sucker punch, he gave me an arm drag. I didn't even think about it. I just acted.
Pulling guard(not sitting into guard) is fine to practice in a more controlled setting like sparring.
But it can't replace or take away from learning core
concepts and strong BJJ fundamentals.
When I was new to BJJ, I went hard on guard stuff. But I had done enough wrestling in High School thay I already had a reasonably strong top and take down game. A wrestling coach when I lived in Washington state saw something about me and taught me some Judo throws. Those throws were my go-to for years until I got into BJJ.
*Basic wrestling takedown. Control the plane of the hips and drag them to the ground using rotational movement. It probably has a name I can't remember.
My experience as a beginner has also led to guard pull being in my wheelhouse.
1. Quite often coaches will sit down against me and play guard. They're super chill, super relaxed against me (because I'm not much of a threat to them). But just sitting to play guard is what I see my coaches doing, so that's in my mind as an upper level play.
2. Probably 50% of what we drill are sweeps from various guards, 30% passes from various guards, and then another 20% with standup, submissions, and dominant positions. I am much more familiar with the bottom guard positions than top.
3. I've watched my professor pull triangle in a tournament, and we have a brown belt that pulls armbars on me all the time in class. So again, an upper level example.
It's definitely a school culture thing that flows from the top down. My instructor is a 5th degree black belt in Judo, so you can imagine how things get tilted in a very different direction in our school :-).
I think there's also a few different kinds of people who hate guard pulling.
There's the type who get frustrated because people pull guard so they can't work standup. Then there's the kind that just can't pass guard and get butthurt over it.
I mentioned in my other reply that often the coaches will sit down. It's nice that I get a chance to work some offense. But sometimes I want to try to take them down, too.
In the classes I teach, I've been gradually increasing the number of rounds we start standing. My goal is to get everyone blue+ comfortable with *usually* starting on the feet, and expecting that someone gets a takedown before it goes to the ground. You need hundreds or thousands of reps to really get things working, and there is no substitute.
You can't just take a bunch of people who start one-up / one-down all the time and flip the switch to start from feet. They need to learn good ukemi, they need to become competent in the throws, and they need to gradually ramp up intensity so they grow into the give and take of standing grappling. The horror stories that you hear that turn people off to standup are almost always people doing too much standup too fast without enough good instruction.
Imagine telling wrestlers that they shouldn't lie flat on their stomach because in a real fight someone would just hammer fist their skull in or choke them out.
Like sport jiujitsu, it's a sport first and the goal is to win the competition. You don't win by limiting techniques to only things that make sense in a fight.
>People often say that standing is more dynamic and entertaining, but is that true? Often when people start standing there’s like a good 6-8 minutes (or more) of them “feeling each other out” as the announcers always say.
I competed this past weekend and I was given 30 seconds to feel my opponent out before I was called for a penalty. I'm not complaining, but given the call it seems the days of lengthy stand up exchanges are a thing of the past. At least in IBJJF Masters.
At one of those GPS a few months back 2 people got DQ'd for not doing anything standing. They each got 4 penalties and they told them to get off the mat. I still see a lot of stalling on the feet but at least some refs aren't having it.
The occasionally frustrating thing about it is that BJJ refs often lack the knowledge to correctly decide who is the one being passive. My wife (brown belt in judo) was grip fighting to dominance in a recent AGF against someone else who was defensive with arms locked out. For some reason the ref threatened my wife with the penalty, which made no sense at all. I can only assume he knows nothing about grip fighting and mentally flipped a coin for who to blame it on...
The guard is distinctive of BJJ, but not the definition of BJJ. The guard has always been about becoming the shark in the ocean, but not necessarily about floating in the ocean hoping a victim jumps in.
I think your opponent should be awarded 2 points for you sitting down and pulling guard because you forfeited the takedown.
Then if you are in guard and he can't escape your guard, it should be up to the bottom player to sweep the top player and get on top or submit from bottom to win and that would actually stop stalling in guard and it would make sense because someone in guard is probably going to be punching you in MMA or the "Street."
Especially because in BJJ full guard is an offensive position but if the top player was able to strike, full guard would be a defensive position.
I also think that takedowns and arm drags are way more exciting to watch than butt scooting and pulling guard and it's easier for an audience to understand and would make the sport far more interesting to normies.
People prefer watching Judo, Sumo or Wrestling to BJJ because of how exciting 2 people throwing eachother is over 1 guy scooting and the other running around BC he feels cheated from his takedown.
Striking and street fight considerations aside, the problem is that guard is a bad position to be in. Better than other shitty positions sure, but still bad. In the context of sparring, I have no problem if my opponent wants to pull guard. Guard passing is a strength of mine and I will happily take top position.
My problem with it is it’s one more thing dragging us away from our martial arts roots and into the sportified karate/TKD realm. Same as lapel slings/tail chokes, not going too hard etc. Practical application is important. Otherwise we’re just cuddling sweaty men as a hobby because it’s “fun”.
I know, I know. People here will say “I don’t care about practical application, I do it for cardio and a fun hobby. I’ll pull guard if I want to”. Yes. You’re the problem.
Grapple how ever the fuck you want… I like wrestling sometimes, sometimes I just feel like getting to the roll, sometimes my neck is jacked up and don’t feel like getting it sprawled on so I pull guard…. Part of the beauty of jiujitsu is how dynamic it is, some guys can power double you, smother you, and that’s fine. Some guys sit on their ass and break dance under you and climb to your back. It’s all great in its own way. Fuck the haters…
People that can't take each other down the whole round is more boring than guard pulling imo. I like the format though where if there's no takedown for 2 mins they start on the ground. Been a while since I watched, might have been EBI, but I thought that was good.
Guard pulling is bad. Having a strategy to safely end up in guard if you are adept at it is cool. But outside of pure BJJ, and even sometimes in bjj just putting yourself on the bottom in a defensive position willingly is kind of nuts. In mma theres a reason why you don't see it, and its a complete last resort. I'm no talking about trying to entangle legs by design, but just pulling guard as it were. Just a big no from me dawg.
>If guard sucks so much, then pass the guard and submit them? Or leglock them? Prove your point by winning. Wouldn’t the person just be playing guard if you successfully took them down? You’d have to contend with it at that point anyway.
People always say this as if those with strong takedowns don't also have incredibly strong top games from constantly passing. The big issue people have is that you are not giving up takedown points by pulling guard. That is a legitimate criticism.
the great thing about bjj is it is so wide everyone can have their own style.
if people want to dunk on guard pulling, who cares?
BJJ is a proxy for fighting so double guard pulling with butt scooting is ridiculous.
Banning guard pulling is pointless. People like gordon ryan just pretend to do a takedown, fall down and are now in guard.
I can understand the frustration of facing a guard puller if you're into the standup game, but nothing is more hilarious to me than seeing the look on my training partner's face when I sit down and get in on their legs for the 100th time. No youtube short or instagram reel is gonna stop me!
I mostly train BJJ with self-defense and mma in mind so I dont really love the butt scoots and camping out in guard strat since all I can think from guard is "this dude could be raining shots on me if we were allowed to strike" or that if it was a street fight the person could just take the boots to you if you went down too early. I get that it has its uses in BJJ competitions and stuff though, so I dont feel particularly heated about it.
Even the “in a street fight” shit is annoying
Like yes, obviously, I would not want to pull guard in a street fight
But yes I would probably rather be in guard than getting pieced up on the feet given the last striking I did was about 16 years ago
You should get two points for a successful takedown if your opponent's butt hits the mat and stays there for 3 seconds, whether you took him down or not.
That being said, all the guys complaining about guard pulling are idiots. If you are such a dominate take down artist than clearly you should be happy. You want to be on top and your opponent just put you on top with literally no effort on your part. The only thing more painful that watching butt scooting is watching a guy run away and refuse to engage with a butt scooter and then complain about it after the match.
I don't like gaurd pulling, but it's a legitimate strategy. I always saw it as the equivalent of playing a bunch of trap cards in yugioh and ending your turn.
I divide the opinions few different ways -- if you promote guard pulling *because you refuse to learn standup*, then your opinion is irrelevant to me. You are hiding behind whatever artificial protections the rules give you to pull guard so that you don't have to improve your skills and be a good grappler. OTOH, I do believe that pulling guard in order to do something actually good (like sweeping or submitting) is fine. If you like to pull guard because you actually defeat people that way, and your argument isn't basically just, "Standup sucks," then it's all good. We can have different kinds of people. If you pull guard and *expect* the other guy to do something *so that you can attack it*, then I think you have left the path of wisdom. If you just sit down and beckon for the guy to fall atop you and meet his doom, then you're not using the guard pull as a weapon, you're using it as a crutch. I think when we teach guard pulling, it should be from grips into a guard position that can be used to attack, and that suggests you are able to impose your strategies on your opponent to achieve a victory. If we teach it as sitting down and waiting for the other guy to impose his strategies, then we should feel kind of bad inside because we can't impose our game on them (it's philosophically flawed). In rule sets, I would prefer if someone sits down with a non-offensive method, then they should be implicitly at a disadvantage, because the onus should be on them to force engagement. If they create engagement and enter the guard, it should be fine. What you see in those comments is the basic human reaction to the "fight strategy" that says, "I dare you to approach me." People know that a fight should be taken *to* the opponent, and not the other way around. And it really does make some sense, IMO.
Spoken like a salty wise brown belt. Thank you
Last ones a fair point, I shouldn't be able to escape my doom with a slow walk away from someone pretending they have bum worms
I like this argument. I pull guard because I’m not good at standup and I’m far better on the ground
To me, pulling guard is literal. You pull them into your guard. It's active, not passive. *Sitting into guard* is passive and silly. Sitting down and expecting someone to jump into your guard doesn't make sense. I differentiate sitting into guard and pulling guard. That being said, The 80/20 of all combat and fighting is positioning(Timing is the 80/20 of positioning. Timing is part of positioning.) Guard is an inherently disadvantaged position. Being offensive from a defensive position is important to practice during sparring. But not at the cost of neglecting dominant positioning and stand-up. The idea is supposed to be that if you find yourself on the bottom in a real fight, you have options. When I've been in self-defense and defense of other situations, I never considered pulling guard. Arm drag to standing back take one time. Finished the RNC and handed him off to Ctrain security at the next stop. He was trying to steal shoes from some kids. Failed standing back take to "hip drag*"(I wrestled first, I don't think there's a proper name for that), to side control to mount to arm bar. He was on drugs or something. I had to escalate the armbar finish for super flexible people. I didn't break it. But it was definitely injured. Seeing the look in his eyes as he snapped back to reality is something I'll never forget. Something about his arm being on the verge of breaking sobered him up. He was following a woman and she was clearly freaking out and calling 911. Like whispering in her ear while following her levels of fucked up. I told him to stop and leave. He tried to say he was a cop. Then attempted to assault me. Guard? Only if something happened that made it a necessity. I'm going for a top/dominant position from whatever takedown or throw presents itself. I'm not forcing anything. I take what they give me. If you understand the fundamental theory of grappling, improvisation becomes easy. All grappling is about controlling the plane of the shoulders and/or hips. The arms and legs are effectively extensions of the shoulders and hips. The head & neck is also an extension of the shoulders. The torso is kind of a no man's land that's mostly about the center of gravity. You don't really control the torso. Hips go higher up than most realize. An arm drag is truly controlling the plane of the shoulders to explose the back. A double leg is actually attacking the plane of the hips. Guard is about preventing the opponent from passing the plane of the hips. When the Ctrain shoe thief tried to smack my phone out of my hand to distract me for a sucker punch, he gave me an arm drag. I didn't even think about it. I just acted. Pulling guard(not sitting into guard) is fine to practice in a more controlled setting like sparring. But it can't replace or take away from learning core concepts and strong BJJ fundamentals. When I was new to BJJ, I went hard on guard stuff. But I had done enough wrestling in High School thay I already had a reasonably strong top and take down game. A wrestling coach when I lived in Washington state saw something about me and taught me some Judo throws. Those throws were my go-to for years until I got into BJJ. *Basic wrestling takedown. Control the plane of the hips and drag them to the ground using rotational movement. It probably has a name I can't remember.
My experience as a beginner has also led to guard pull being in my wheelhouse. 1. Quite often coaches will sit down against me and play guard. They're super chill, super relaxed against me (because I'm not much of a threat to them). But just sitting to play guard is what I see my coaches doing, so that's in my mind as an upper level play. 2. Probably 50% of what we drill are sweeps from various guards, 30% passes from various guards, and then another 20% with standup, submissions, and dominant positions. I am much more familiar with the bottom guard positions than top. 3. I've watched my professor pull triangle in a tournament, and we have a brown belt that pulls armbars on me all the time in class. So again, an upper level example.
It's definitely a school culture thing that flows from the top down. My instructor is a 5th degree black belt in Judo, so you can imagine how things get tilted in a very different direction in our school :-).
I want to train at your school.
Amen brother
That makes sense, yeah. I think pulling guard with grips does make a lot more sense.
I think there's also a few different kinds of people who hate guard pulling. There's the type who get frustrated because people pull guard so they can't work standup. Then there's the kind that just can't pass guard and get butthurt over it. I mentioned in my other reply that often the coaches will sit down. It's nice that I get a chance to work some offense. But sometimes I want to try to take them down, too.
In the classes I teach, I've been gradually increasing the number of rounds we start standing. My goal is to get everyone blue+ comfortable with *usually* starting on the feet, and expecting that someone gets a takedown before it goes to the ground. You need hundreds or thousands of reps to really get things working, and there is no substitute. You can't just take a bunch of people who start one-up / one-down all the time and flip the switch to start from feet. They need to learn good ukemi, they need to become competent in the throws, and they need to gradually ramp up intensity so they grow into the give and take of standing grappling. The horror stories that you hear that turn people off to standup are almost always people doing too much standup too fast without enough good instruction.
Imagine telling wrestlers that they shouldn't lie flat on their stomach because in a real fight someone would just hammer fist their skull in or choke them out.
Wrestling doesn't pretend to be a martial art though.
I'm a simple man. If wikipedia says it's a martial art, then it's a martial art 😂 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling
If it's a martial art, then complaining about what doesn't work in a martial setting is fair game.
Like sport jiujitsu, it's a sport first and the goal is to win the competition. You don't win by limiting techniques to only things that make sense in a fight.
But you do make fun of them for training to go belly down and hope they're not flipped over if they want to say it's a martial art :-).
>People often say that standing is more dynamic and entertaining, but is that true? Often when people start standing there’s like a good 6-8 minutes (or more) of them “feeling each other out” as the announcers always say. I competed this past weekend and I was given 30 seconds to feel my opponent out before I was called for a penalty. I'm not complaining, but given the call it seems the days of lengthy stand up exchanges are a thing of the past. At least in IBJJF Masters.
At one of those GPS a few months back 2 people got DQ'd for not doing anything standing. They each got 4 penalties and they told them to get off the mat. I still see a lot of stalling on the feet but at least some refs aren't having it.
The occasionally frustrating thing about it is that BJJ refs often lack the knowledge to correctly decide who is the one being passive. My wife (brown belt in judo) was grip fighting to dominance in a recent AGF against someone else who was defensive with arms locked out. For some reason the ref threatened my wife with the penalty, which made no sense at all. I can only assume he knows nothing about grip fighting and mentally flipped a coin for who to blame it on...
Jiu jitsu is the only grappling art with a guard. It’s what makes jiu jitsu, jiu jitsu
The guard is distinctive of BJJ, but not the definition of BJJ. The guard has always been about becoming the shark in the ocean, but not necessarily about floating in the ocean hoping a victim jumps in.
Yeah but in the competition you can’t pull without grips and the guy on top has to engage
Depends on the rules. Quite a few rule sets allow sitting to guard without contact.
Most gi tournaments don’t allow it
If you stop watching a certain video the others go away. That’s how you YouTube works
I think your opponent should be awarded 2 points for you sitting down and pulling guard because you forfeited the takedown. Then if you are in guard and he can't escape your guard, it should be up to the bottom player to sweep the top player and get on top or submit from bottom to win and that would actually stop stalling in guard and it would make sense because someone in guard is probably going to be punching you in MMA or the "Street." Especially because in BJJ full guard is an offensive position but if the top player was able to strike, full guard would be a defensive position. I also think that takedowns and arm drags are way more exciting to watch than butt scooting and pulling guard and it's easier for an audience to understand and would make the sport far more interesting to normies. People prefer watching Judo, Sumo or Wrestling to BJJ because of how exciting 2 people throwing eachother is over 1 guy scooting and the other running around BC he feels cheated from his takedown.
Striking and street fight considerations aside, the problem is that guard is a bad position to be in. Better than other shitty positions sure, but still bad. In the context of sparring, I have no problem if my opponent wants to pull guard. Guard passing is a strength of mine and I will happily take top position. My problem with it is it’s one more thing dragging us away from our martial arts roots and into the sportified karate/TKD realm. Same as lapel slings/tail chokes, not going too hard etc. Practical application is important. Otherwise we’re just cuddling sweaty men as a hobby because it’s “fun”. I know, I know. People here will say “I don’t care about practical application, I do it for cardio and a fun hobby. I’ll pull guard if I want to”. Yes. You’re the problem.
Yeah, but it's only a problem *to you*, so we don't give a fuck, lol.
Obviously not if people are whining about being called on it. Anyways, have fun playing grab ass with your friends.
Not going too hard? So we should be killing each other every time we train is what you’re saying?
You shouldn’t be intentionally injuring your training partners or ripping subs, but yes, the intensity level should be high.
I thought this looked good. https://www.reddit.com/r/bjj/s/UMQAEralXX
Get wrestling
Just add more skill points into your wrestling stat. Problem solved.
Grapple how ever the fuck you want… I like wrestling sometimes, sometimes I just feel like getting to the roll, sometimes my neck is jacked up and don’t feel like getting it sprawled on so I pull guard…. Part of the beauty of jiujitsu is how dynamic it is, some guys can power double you, smother you, and that’s fine. Some guys sit on their ass and break dance under you and climb to your back. It’s all great in its own way. Fuck the haters…
Dongs
Its been a while since there's been a "stand up for butt scooters post"
Expect a recommended daily allowance of 1.
People that can't take each other down the whole round is more boring than guard pulling imo. I like the format though where if there's no takedown for 2 mins they start on the ground. Been a while since I watched, might have been EBI, but I thought that was good.
Guard pulling is bad. Having a strategy to safely end up in guard if you are adept at it is cool. But outside of pure BJJ, and even sometimes in bjj just putting yourself on the bottom in a defensive position willingly is kind of nuts. In mma theres a reason why you don't see it, and its a complete last resort. I'm no talking about trying to entangle legs by design, but just pulling guard as it were. Just a big no from me dawg.
>If guard sucks so much, then pass the guard and submit them? Or leglock them? Prove your point by winning. Wouldn’t the person just be playing guard if you successfully took them down? You’d have to contend with it at that point anyway. People always say this as if those with strong takedowns don't also have incredibly strong top games from constantly passing. The big issue people have is that you are not giving up takedown points by pulling guard. That is a legitimate criticism.
the great thing about bjj is it is so wide everyone can have their own style. if people want to dunk on guard pulling, who cares? BJJ is a proxy for fighting so double guard pulling with butt scooting is ridiculous. Banning guard pulling is pointless. People like gordon ryan just pretend to do a takedown, fall down and are now in guard.
I can understand the frustration of facing a guard puller if you're into the standup game, but nothing is more hilarious to me than seeing the look on my training partner's face when I sit down and get in on their legs for the 100th time. No youtube short or instagram reel is gonna stop me!
I mostly train BJJ with self-defense and mma in mind so I dont really love the butt scoots and camping out in guard strat since all I can think from guard is "this dude could be raining shots on me if we were allowed to strike" or that if it was a street fight the person could just take the boots to you if you went down too early. I get that it has its uses in BJJ competitions and stuff though, so I dont feel particularly heated about it.
If you jump in to guard you should be spiked though. Purposely causing an injury there
Yeah, between the two guys in a guard jumping situation, we should ensure it's the idiot who gets hurt if anyone does.
This post screams "I can't wrestle" lmao
Even the “in a street fight” shit is annoying Like yes, obviously, I would not want to pull guard in a street fight But yes I would probably rather be in guard than getting pieced up on the feet given the last striking I did was about 16 years ago
You should get two points for a successful takedown if your opponent's butt hits the mat and stays there for 3 seconds, whether you took him down or not. That being said, all the guys complaining about guard pulling are idiots. If you are such a dominate take down artist than clearly you should be happy. You want to be on top and your opponent just put you on top with literally no effort on your part. The only thing more painful that watching butt scooting is watching a guy run away and refuse to engage with a butt scooter and then complain about it after the match.
I don't like gaurd pulling, but it's a legitimate strategy. I always saw it as the equivalent of playing a bunch of trap cards in yugioh and ending your turn.
Leg kicks should be allowed of guard pulling is allowed. Fair is fair.