Only one day of class this week for me, so I was forced to cram 2 days of defense into one day. Luckily, the goal was to give the students a broad overview with one defining concept. In almost every choking situation, the offensive player is looking to compress their opponent. Conversely, a defender always always benefits from expansion. If we want to defend a triangle, or any arm plus neck choke, we should focus on keeping our trapped shoulder away from our ear. If I can succeed in this, I should be able to reduce the risk of being strangled.

Drill: Our first drill of the class was just that. We started inside of a triangle, with the only goal being ‘keep our ear off our shoulder’. We worked in pairs, with cooperative partners. Increasing our intensity as we felt comfortable.

Discussion: Clearly this is a losing battle. I often talk about success rate and with submission defense we should be working with a very low success rate. Especially when we are just learning. Our early stage defense is simple, we want to create posture and make ourselves as big as possible. To finish the triangle our opponent typically needs to bring our trapped arm across their body, so we have to try our best to stop that from happening. In the event that our opponent is successful in this, we have to go with that motion and transition our defense to moving towards the free arm. If our opponent can’t move our arm across their body then we can begin our escape towards our trapped arm. Both directions open up scrambles and potentially secondary submission attempts, but we are working out of a very bad spot. So escaping without a follow up threat is rarely possible.

Sparring: For our sparring section I asked the students to start inside of a triangle and work from there. We worked in 1 minute rounds with 1 minute spent escaping and 1 minute spent attacking with the same partner. The defender has two options. 1) defend the submission for the entire minute 2) escape the submission. The offensive player must finish the triangle choke, or move to an immediate armbar. We did this with 3 partners for a total of six 1 minute rounds.

Conclusion: This is tough, defenses are never learned in an hour, so our success rate should have been very low. Realistically the only success we should have had was due to our training partners have terrible triangles. But this will get better with time. For now, these defense classes are meant to only buy us time, not to perfect the defense. I want the students to have an idea of what they can do to defend and ultimately lengthen the match.

When you are in a submission there’s only one goal “lengthen the match”

What happens after the defense or escape doesn’t matter right now, just focus on making the match longer.