Attacking the back brings the class back to a more traditional structure. I always try to avoid making submissions into games. Mostly because I want to reduce the risk of injury, but also because I want the students to understand that when they have a position secured there is a step by step process to getting the tap. This is the moment where time slows down and we need to be in complete control. For the first day of back submissions I want to keep things very simple, but also give the students something fun to play with. So we focused on 2 basic chokes

Technique 1: This is about as basic as it gets, we started with a cross collar choke from the back. It’s important for students to understand we have a choking arm and a control arm when we control the back. This takes the shape of a seatbelt grip with one arm over our opponents shoulder and the other arm going under our opponents arm pit. Our choking arm is the arm over the shoulder, this arm offers us very little in terms of control but is our primary choking arm. The underhook offers great control but almost no ability to be the primary choking arm. I will often see students confuse these and they will try to lapel choke via the underhook control arm. While there are ways to make this work, it is typically not the correct technique. One thing I always mention when I teach lapel chokes is the proper grip on the lapel. I leaned this years ago from a Michelle Kwon tutorial. She always taught us to flip the lapel outwards before gripping the lapel to give us a more secure grip. It would take me paragraphs to explain, so as always, I’ll send you to YouTube to check the technique videos. There are loads of great videos on the cross collar choke from the back.

Technique 2: This one is a personal favorite of mine. We use the same choking arm grip on the lapel but this time instead of gripping the lapel with our control arm we swim to a half Nelson to complete the choke. If you want to check out the details you can search for Wing choke or half Nelson choke.

The class ended with a game, we had to modify the game to allow for a bit more Jiu jitsu, but I think it was a great way to end the class.

Active player started on the back with one hook in and double underhooks. Their objective was simple, secure the back and finish a submission. All other outcomes would result in a win for the defensive player. As always we worked in pods with 3 minutes of active time for the offensive player.

Conclusion: I’ll start by echoing my thoughts from the previous back classes. This block needs to be 3x as long. There’s simply no way to have competency in 4 classes. So we need to revisit this and anchor on the back for the month of June. My main goal as always been to reinforce this idea that every match should end on the back. Our goal from start to finish is to find a way onto our opponents back. If we find a submission along the way we should absolutely take it, but the primary focus should be on getting to the back. We can only do this by spending more time with this topic. Day two will focus on unique transition off the back to chase a submission that should open up the students eyes to a whole new world of transition possibilities. It should be a really fun class!