This will be our first class taught by Lea. So I won’t have first hand accounts of what happened. This means these next few pages will be the topics how I would present them and with the important details that I would have highlighted if I were on the mats with the team. Most of this parallels what Lea taught and we have communicated to recap the class.

Today will be our first class on taking the back. I wanted to introduce this from the mount position so that the class already has some familiarity with the starting position. We have also covered and arm triangle from mount in our submissions block so this should be a relatively easy transition for the class. The class begins with a quick introduction to the goals of the game. The big focus here is on staying behind one of my opponents arms, exactly as we do with an arm triangle. From here the goal is to secure the back via chair sit motion.

Game 1: Starting in the mount position, with their head under bottom players arm (arm triangle), top player can win the game by securing the back, they are free to get to the back any way they would like. Bottom person needs to clear the threat of the back take by recovering their arm and returning to mount, or by escaping the position.

Discussion: I would expect to see many solid back attacks, but I’m certain the students will struggle to secure back with hooks before their opponent is able to scramble to a winning position. The goal here is to have them understand the concept of going under the arm to gain back exposure. I often talk about ‘clamp move, clamp move’. The idea that if my arms are clamping you my legs are free to move and as my legs are clamping you my arms are free to move. This game highlights that concept perfectly. When we start in mount we clamp with our legs to allow our arms to hand fight. Once we win the hand fight and get to the arm triangle position we can then clamp with our arms to allow our legs to move. This step by step process is importing if we want to increase our win percentage. Not only for this back take, but for almost every technique in Jiu jitsu. For game two I really want the students to understand and implement this concept.

Game 2: No changes to the game format or rules. As always we run our games in pods of 4 or 5 students based on the size of the class. Each active player works for 3 minutes while the bottom players rotates in when a rep has ended.

Conclusion: I would expect this to be a frustrating class for the top player. Even though we focus a lot on the clamp move concept it is still something that even advanced players forget in the heat of the moment. They tend to rush to the finish and lose their position just before really solidifying a strong position. This will take time, and we should expect to see far more failures than successes. On Wednesday we will look at this exact situation from the bottom position with and arm drag from closed guard. As always I think students learn better when they try something new from a topside position, then progress to a similar technique from their backs. We will see if this holds up tomorrow