LOCK N ROLL

Check out the first part of this series, The Language of Jiu Jitsu: Posture.

Leverage is probably the most common term thrown about by Jiu Jitsuka. It is a principle we understand well, but not completely. Leverage is very important as it allows us generate more force than our muscles can produce.

A lever is any rigid object that transfers our physical effort from one end of the lever, about a pivot point (called a fulcrum), to the end of the lever where we are aiming to affect a load. Depending on where the fulcrum is located along the lever we can either increase (or even decrease) the amount of force that arrives at the other end of the lever.

The classical example of leverage in Jiu Jitsu is the arm bar, and it’s an extreme one. The armbar attacks the elbow joint by treating the entire arm as a single lever. We create a pivot point at the arms weakest point, the elbow. We then attempt to lift our opponent’s entire body mass about their elbow. Making matters worse we exert further force through our hips and legs to increasing the resistance on the opposite site of the lever. Inevitably the biceps cannot handle this compound load; the force is then shared on the elbow joint and supporting tendons and bone. The elbow joint separates catastrophically.

Although submissions are our end goal in any grappling match, for the bulk of Jiu Jitsu the context of leverage is a little different. Our skeletons are a complex frame of levers, but instead of lifting tremendous loads with these levers, we move our body weight to the edges of our opponent’s skeleton so that it’s hard for our opponent’s to do any work at all.

Our knowledge of leverage makes our opponent’s work much harder; this is the science of pinning. Pinning is arguably the Jiu Jitsukas primary use case for leverage.

Moving to the end of the lever:

• To maintain side control, we flatten and hold ourselves perpendicular to our opponent, along their ribs and shoulders, effectively fastening huge weights at either side of our opponent’s spine. Pinning our opponent’s shoulders makes escaping incredibly hard for our opponent. If we become active, the better we get at maintaining side control. We can shift even more of our weight to the end of the lever (shoulder) they’d like to move, making an escape harder than if we statically hold side control.
• The smash pass, our opponent’s hips are the fulcrum. We apply our force on our opponent’s knees driving their knees to the mat; this turns our opponent’s body in the direction of their smashed knees, pinning our opponent so we can pass.
• When performing a leg weave pass we use our fist as a fulcrum, pressing into the mat, our forearm becomes the lever. With our forearm in place we can lever our opponent’s knees to the mat and which stops our opponent replacing their guard.

John Will and David Meyer nail the topic of leverage and side control:

Xande Ribeiro teaches a beautiful and effective smash pass, he collapses his opponent’s knee shield by sprawling at the edge of his knees.

The other part of leverage that needs more attention is the placement of the fulcrum. Often the construction or placement of a lever is out of our control, in this situation we have to move the fulcrum.

Moving the fulcrum closer to the load:

• During scissor sweep, we drop one leg to the mat, at the base of our as a fulcrum for the sweep, their torso is the lever we are working. If we don’t lower our fulcrum leg, we dilute our leverage.
• During reverse scissor sweep, our opponent’s posture is broken over our shin infront their hips. Our hip is the fulcrum, and we shift it in line with our opponent’s center to execute the sweep efficiently.
• When performing a toehold the foot bones act as a lever, their toes are at the end of the lever so we grab them, but it’s where we place our own forearm opposite the vulnerable lateral ligaments that make the submission effective.

Sean Roberts breaks down his reverse scissor sweep with Trumpet Dan, watch Seans hip (the fulcrum) in this luscious sweep:

Deconstruct your Jiu Jitsu into leverage problems. What levers are at work? Where is the load? Where is your fulcrum? Increase your understanding of leverage and you’ll make your opponent work harder, and multiply your own efforts.

I believe in an omoplata in every household, and an armbar for every child!
Submission only tournaments are the way of the future. The clubs I belong to don’t train for points either, this is because it is empirical fact that jiu jitsu is about tenacious survival and sexy submissions, or get out!

The plastic surgeon has just chopped cartilage from my ear, and implanted some extra breasts, so I’m off the mats for a few weeks. Consequentially I have time and capacity to do other jiu jitsu things!
I put my hand up to help organise a Submission Only tournament for my mates and training partners at Lockdown MMA. The tournament ran this weekend and it was awesome like tonnes of broccoli.

We ran the competition in a round robin format. Round robin makes for a superior first competition too, no stress from complicated rules, and plenty of mat time. Where jiu jitsu tournaments are few and far between, it is important to maximise the competition exposure, round robin is crucial. Submission only creates dynamic matches and encourages grapplers to become better finishers. Double win!

Rules – Keeping it simple
Submission only ends the match
No time limits
No weight divisions
Two divisions, under 2 years and over 2 years grappling
No slams to escape submissions
No neck cranks
No twisting leg attacks (for under 2 years)
No finger or toebars
No gouging or rendering
If a match goes off the mat and the position is distinct, the same position is reset in the middle of the mat, otherwise fighters reset standing
If both players are stalling, the match is reset standing
Modified random round robin draw (draw administration is the trickiest part!)

Average match lengths
Keeping our 2 mats full at all times we ran for roughly 4 1/2 hours and had ~80 matches. Each match lasted on average 6 1/2 minutes, and we had a one monster match of probably 30 minutes and a couple for ~15 minutes.

Keeping the mats full
It took 3 people to operate 1 mat (we had 2 mats operational, so 6 people total):
Referee – Deals with starts, resets, warnings, DQs, announces the upcoming fighters, and the next fighters after that
Draw manager – knows who is fighting next, and records who just won
Mat manager – Gets the next fighters ready and on to the mats as soon as the last match has finished

Submission pornography
Submissions, in your face ears and nose! We started recording the submissions and made a nerdy tally:
19 armbars
11 triangles
7 arm triangles
7 guillotines
7 rear naked choke
6 figure fours
6 kimuras
4 footlocks
2 knee bars
2 achilles lock
1 north/south choke

Unsurprisingly armbars are the king of submissions and triangles a silly second.
More interestingly, triangles were far more common in the over 2 year division than the under 2 year division, otherwise the submission distribution was fairly similar between the two divisions.
Perhaps this provides a definition for the fabled ‘advanced technique’? That a technique is considered advanced when takes longer to learn but is high percentage once learned.

In ze future
It’ll be nice scaling this event up, we could certainly run a bigger competition with enough people running the mats. We could introduce weight clusters too (5 lightest fighters, next 5 lightest…) I’d also like to record better statistics such as individual match timings and position.

Locknrollout