MMA Basics: The Guard

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Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was in many ways the originating style of MMA. The promotion began as a vehicle for the Gracies to prove that their family art was the best system for 1-1 combat. And what distinguishes BJJ from other grappling styles including its progenitor, Judo, is the centrality of the guard. At its most basic, the guard is a position in which one combatant on his back uses his limbs and positioning to keep the combatant on top from dealing damage with strikes or advancing to a better position such as side control, mount, or back mount. Possibilities exist for sweeps (reversals of position where the bottom man ends up on top) and submissions, but the primary goal of the guard player is to avoid taking damage. In sport BJJ the guard is the primary battleground with most high level matches consisting of extended sequences of guard play vs guard passing with standup work and defense from inferior positions being largely perfunctory. 

In MMA, however, the guard assumes a role much closer to its originating ideal. It’s a position for the disadvantaged, where a fighter who has been taken down or knocked down by a punch can find a moment’s respite and, if he’s lucky, catch a submission or sweep his opponent. In the early UFCs you mostly saw basic closed guard, but over time fighters have figured out how to make many guards formerly thought useful only for sport viable in the octagon. 

Closed Guard

Closed guard is the most basic and essential method of playing guard. The position occurs when the bottom man has both his legs fully encircling the torso of his opponent. From this position, the guard player can tie up the top man (preventing strikes) and has a variety of submissions and sweeps at his disposal. A great example of closed guard use comes from the 2013 clash between UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson and challenger Anthony Pettis.

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Finding himself on bottom Pettis wraps his legs around Bendo keeping him close while using his hands to control the champion’s arms preventing strikes. When he’s able to get Henderson’s right arm slightly across the centerline, Pretty Tony throws his leg over the top as he pivots locking in an armbar and becoming the new LW titleist on the tap. 

There are several different variations of the closed guard that you might see utilized in MMA, most notably the Joe Rogan favorite rubber guard, consisting of a closed guard where the bottom man brings one of his legs up high over his opponent’s back and grabs his own shin. However, the basic idea with all of them is to control the posture and limit the striking chances of the man on top. If the guarder is not able to do that it can go very badly for him as Fedor Emilianenko demonstrated on multiple occasions, including his first fight with Antonio Nogueira.

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Big Nog tries to control Fedor’s arms to set up a triangle choke, but the Last Emperor is able to break free and posture up. Once the Russian challenger has some space he’s able to generate tremendous power raining blows down on his Brazilian rival.

While Brazilian jiu jitsu stylists were able to catch many an unwary opponent with armbars, triangle chokes, and guillotines from closed guard in the early days of MMA, submissions from the position are less common in the modern game now that all fighters understand the dangers for the top player in the position. Closed guard these days is more commonly used to stall out the grappling portion of a fight in hopes of limiting damage and obtaining a referee standup. If a fighter wants to be offensive with their guard, a more common option is the next guard we’ll consider, known as the half guard.

Half Guard

As the name implies, half guard is halfway between closed guard (both legs around your opponent) and open guard (legs not fully encircled on the opponent at all). Half guard is a diverse family of related positions, but they all have in common that the guard player has one and only one of the legs of the top man trapped. The two main flavors of half guard you see most commonly used in MMA are the traditional underhook half guard and half guard with a shin shield, often referred to as Z guard. There are other variations that appear from time to time such as deep half, but these are somewhat rare in comparison.

Underhook Half Guard

Sometimes referred to as coyote guard, Leite half guard (after the sport BJJ standard bearer of the position), or the knee torque, this version of half guard is often preferred by fighters who are good wrestlers as it affords the bottom man the chance to come up to his knees and attack a single leg on his opponent. The key points for playing this version are to get an underhook and to keep your head relatively close to the top fighter’s body. A fighter who uses this position masterfully in his fights is jiu jitsu ace Demian Maia.

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Having failed on a takedown, Maia pulls half guard against Jorge Masvidal. By overhooking Cuban Jesus’s ankle with his left leg and dropping his underhook to the thigh, Demian creates the angle to get to his knees and transition to a takedown against the fence. 

This version of half guard gives the fighter on the bottom good chances to reverse, but it can also prove very risky because you can’t fully control the top man’s body and arms. He can often strike or attack with chokes to great effect. In addition, if you don’t get your underhook and the top fighter does, you can find yourself flattened to the mat with very little chance of improving your position. 

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Here GSP is able to partially pass Dan Hardy’s guard ending up in half with an underhook. ‘Rush’ uses the underhook to flatten Hardy and take away any space between them. Hardy has no defense for the follow up shots or further pass attempts.

If a fighter doesn’t want to play this double edged version of half guard, there is a safer alternative.

Z Guard

In keeping with the randomness of Brazilian jiu jitsu nomenclature this guard also has several names: shin shield half, 93 guard, and most commonly Z guard. The advantage of this position over traditional underhook half is that the shin is across the top man’s hips or torso, allowing the guard player greater distance control and providing the ability to lock your legs around the passer’s hips limiting his mobility. There is a disadvantage, however. The distance between the top and bottom fighters is greater. As such, it is harder for the bottom man to set up submissions or sweeps. As such this guard is most commonly used in MMA to avoid taking damage and set up disengagement with the goal of getting back to the feet. A couple of examples of good use of the guard come from a 2014 fight between Jordan Mein and Hernani Perpetuo.

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Finding himself on bottom, Perpetuo uses the knee shield to keep himself out of range of Mein’s strikes from the top. When Jordan does load up to dive in with a shot, Perpetuo times his forward movement and moves forward blocking Mein’s punch and tying him up.

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In the second round Perpetuo finds himself on bottom again. This time he’s able to combine his knee shield with a post on Mein’s head with his left arm to create the space to get back to his feet.

Transitional possibilities abound when playing half guard. It’s not uncommon to see fighters move from Z to underhook half or to circle their top leg inside the top man’s legs or post a foot on his hip moving to some flavor of our next topic, open guards.

Open Guard

Open guards are any guards where the guard player doesn’t have control of his opponent’s body with encircled legs. These guard positions tend to be very fluid and transitional in nature. Due to that fluidity there are many, many variations of open guards, and BJJ practitioners can argue endlessly about the nuances of which guard is which and when a given open guard engagement qualifies as butterfly, X, De la Riva, Reverse De la Riva, and so on. For the purposes of this article we’ll focus less on that sort of pedantry and more on the basic motifs of various open guards and how those dynamics play out in MMA. The first guard we’ll touch on is butterfly.

Butterfly Guard

So named because of the characteristic leg position, similar to a butterfly stretch, this guard occurs when the guard player has both of his insteps on the inside of his opponent’s thighs. It’s a versatile open guard with a lot of similarities to wrestling in that hand fighting, battles of head posture, and under- and over-hooking are all of prime importance. In MMA it’s mostly commonly used to threaten the top man’s balance and create opportunities for scrambles back to the feet. A good use of the guard in that context came in Cain Velasquez’s title winning effort against Brock Lesnar.

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Demonstrating the ridiculous explosiveness he was known for, Lesnar takes Cain off his feet with a blast double leg. Velasquez immediately starts elevating the WWE star with his legs while posting on Lesnar’s head to create space. As Lesnar pops to his feet to try and pass guard Cain is able to get a leg under himself and stand up.

In addition to being used for creating stand ups, butterfly is also an excellent platform for entering into the guards we’ll talk about next, leg entanglements.

Leg Entanglements

Leg entanglements are a huge subject. The positions are so diverse that covering them as a group is difficult, but there’s a good reason for doing so: in MMA, the specifics of whether you’re in ashi garami, 50/50, a leg knot, or inside sankaku is less important for the viewer than understanding the facets all these positions have in common, namely that it will be very hard for the top player to stay standing with good balance, the bottom player can control the distance between the fighters making striking difficult, and someone might get foot locked (the possibility of an immediate attack on the legs is what distinguishes a leg entanglement from the half guard family of positions). That said, let’s look at a few specific examples starting with the recent fight between leg locker extraordinaire Ryan Hall and MMA legend BJ Penn.

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After a throwaway kick, Hall dives under the legs of Penn inverting in a form of Imanari roll. Notice that in the final position Penn is facing away from Hall unable to strike or stand up, and that one wrong turn is enough to give Hall the heel hook.

This short engagement shows a best case scenario for the fighter initiating the leg entanglement. Penn is never really in any position to hurt Hall and it only takes a minor error for BJ to end up tapping. Hall’s dynamic entry is becoming more common in MMA with other fighters like Tony Ferguson and most of the Tristar roster showing a fondness for the rolling entries named after Japanese leg locking terror Masakazu Imanari. Japanese fighters have had a preference for dynamic entries into leg locks dating back to the early days of Pancrase, no discussion of which would be complete without a mention of Ryo Chonan’s epic flying leg lock of Anderson Silva.

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Chonan stalks Silva around the PRIDE ring. Seeing the Spider’s front leg available due to his bladed stance, Chonan throws himself through the air winding his legs around Silva’s taking him to the mat for a lighting fast heel hook.

Of course, leg entanglements don’t always end well for the bottom fighter. If the top man is able to collapse the space between himself and his opponent the guard player can end up in a very compromised position where little defense from strikes is possible. The brief UFC career of Marcin Held is a cautionary tale of what can happen to a dynamic leg locker when he comes up against opponents who can ride out his attacks. Another example of an infamous leg locker coming up short when his favorite strategy didn’t work is Rousimar “Paul Harris” Palhares, who ran into trouble against Alan Belcher. In one of the, frankly, ballsiest performances in UFC history Belcher went into the lion’s den against Palhares (who was on a streak of ignoring taps to inflict career ending injuries) engaging him in a leg locking battle confident in his ability to come out on top.

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In this extended sequence we can see Palhares continually rolling and shifting his attack on Belcher’s leg. The Talent is constantly changing the angle of his foot and knee while also fighting Paul Harris’s hands to prevent the Brazilian from locking onto his foot. While Palhares has Belcher in danger Alan can’t do much but defend, but when Belcher is able to finally clear his knee past Palhares’s legs and come up on top the BTT product is largely out of options.

In many cases when leg entanglements occur the bottom fighter won’t be looking for leg locks, but rather just to sweep and get on top or create a scramble. In cases like that you often won’t even see a full entanglement, just a partial interlacing of legs. An example of this scenario can be seen in Conor McGregor’s first fight with Nate Diaz in which the Irishman’s underrated ground game gives him a quick reversal.

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After being taken down off a caught kick, McGregor immediately gets his feet inside Diaz’s legs and grabs Nate’s ankles. Conor then swims his right foot onto Diaz’s hip and elevates him over the top for a clean sweep.

This sequence has elements of butterfly guard and a leg entanglement, demonstrating how categorization of these positions can be hard. The important thing to notice is how McGregor uses his legs to control the distance and disturb Diaz’s balance, keys to all variations of open guard.

Conclusion

Guard play in MMA is a deep subject that can be difficult to understand given the nuances of positioning and the confusion naming conventions involved. As a fan, the things to focus on to know who’s winning are can the guard player control the distance, either tying his opponent up or creating so much space that he can’t be punched effectively? Can the bottom man disrupt the balance of the top fighter? Does the bottom player have a route to a submission, like a guillotine or a leg lock, or is he flat on his back with limited hip mobility? Frank Shamrock once said that the important things to consider when assessing grappling positions in MMA are who can do damage and who is expending energy. If you keep those principles in mind guard play will start to make a lot more sense.


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