How To Develop A Sick Open Guard

Take control of the match while buttscooting

I already posted about the open guard in the past (right here), but this is such an extensive topic that it needs a continuation. So here I am, trying my best to help you develop the dopest open guard possible for No Gi Jiu-Jitsu (and trying to develop it myself as well). But anyway, I recommend reading the other one before because I don’t want to repeat the same things to add more information.

But even with that intention, I can’t do a post about open guard without talking about connection, so let’s start with it.

Connection as it leads to… everything?

As the bottom player, we are looking to get connections to our opponent to create destabilization. This destabilization allows us to improve our connections, invert the top player or submit the top player. So a lot of our work on open guard is connecting effectively to our opponent.

John Dahaner says that there are three types of open guard: seated guard, supine guard and turtle. I tend to consider turtle more of a pin but it is 100% a great tool for late-stage guard retention (and I use it a lot, more than I should maybe), but for now, let’s focus on supine guard (back on the mat) and seated guard.

In No Gi specifically, if we want to make connections, being supine is a bad option because we have less mobility and our hands are farther away from our opponent. But sometimes our opponent keeps forcing us to supine guard, without allowing us to go back to seated, so what can we do here?

The main problem of using supine without connection is that our opponent will start to apply side-to-side dynamic pressure and probably will pass our guard after some attempts, and we won’t be able to go back to seated until we can create space. Well, the solution is self-frames. We want to frame on ourselves, basically on our legs. This makes the structure of our guard stronger and allows us to retain for longer.

So let’s say our opponent tries a toreando to our right, so we fame on our left leg in a way that can be still in place to retain and now our opponent is close enough to us but hasn’t passed our guard, that’s when we change to frame on him (for example on his shoulder) and to connect as well. Usually, it is better to frame in this situation with our left arm (which was framing on our own leg) and connect with our right arm. After that we need a strong lower body frame (like a lasso for example) and that allows us to use our left arm for connection as well. At that point we have a pretty solid set of connections to our opponent and we can attack. Now, if at some moment in the process, our opponent backs out, great! that’s what we wanted anyway, now we can go back to seated guard.

I started with supine guard because if we can’t create a threat from there we are pretty much hopeless against a really good guard passer, but now that we have a strategy from there that allows us to not only attack but to recover to seated guard, we can start to play more of an offensive game from the bottom, being the hunter.

Now we can use our seated guard freely, and we can be the attacker rather than the defender, but what we should do?

The Golden Rule

Connection, connection and more connection. Jiu-Jitsu is a game of connection, I will never stop with that. A good objective to search to connect is behind our opponent’s knees with our hands while we connect our chest to the front of the knee in any way we can. It doesn’t matter how it looks, it doesn’t matter how it is made, just do that.

Think about shin to shin guard for example (I love shin to shin). What you are doing is exactly that while connecting your own shin to his shin. Now think about wrestle-ups, exactly, the same.

So by doing this, he can play the dilemma between leg attacks and wrestle-ups, which is kinda the modern way of using open guard anyway. To get to the back of the knees of our opponent we will have his hands on the way, so we need to clear his hands to get access to our objective, and we do this any way we can! There’s not a correct way! Just try!

Now, this is not the only way to attack from open guard, but I believe is a good start, because let’s be honest, everybody can do that. If you take a day 1 white belt and tell him to stay seated and try to grab the back of the knees while clearing the hands of his opponent (and you constraint the opponent in some way) he will be able to do it.

We get the connection, what’s next? Say with me: D-E-S-T-A-B-I-L-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N. Hopefully you are already catching up with this. Focus on forcing your opponent to post on the mat, or put his butt on the floor, whatever and again, in any way you can!

I could make a list of possible techniques from open guard and that would have been a lost of time, rather, I want you to understand what are our objectives while playing this dynamic guard.

But…

But what about K Guard, De La Riva and RDLR? These are dope configurations of open guard (even tho RDLR can be called a variation of half guard). All of these guards are played in a supine guard so that’s why I didn’t talk about them in the seated guard portion of the post. If you want to play with them, great, they work really well.

In K Guard you use your shin as a frame to your opponent's leg (usually thigh, but also knee and even shin) while you are hooking your near arm behind his leg (if he/she is on his/her knees, then we follow the rule of connecting to the back of our opponent’s knee, but if is standing we connect to the calf usually) and from there we destabilize our opponent. It works great to attack leg locks and upper body submissions depending on your opponent's reaction. Even back takes are a great option from there.

DLR consists of wrapping our leg around the outside of our opponent's leg while we control the foot of that leg. If we use an underhook we can change to K Guard which is my favorite way of attack from DLR, but we can still do cool stuff from DLR. Obviously, the berimbolo is there, and Levi is a master of it. But we just need to destabilize our opponent in any way we can and the opportunities will appear themselves.

RDLR consists of wrapping our leg around the inside of our opponent’s leg, that’s why is more of a half guard but it’s okay. The concept is the same, destabilization for different attacks. We have Kiss of the Dragon (my favorite), dummy sweeps, wrestle-ups, leg entries and so on. But it doesn’t matter, just, follow the invariants.

And I haven’t talked about inside guards because a lot of them appear naturally while using the seated guard system but they are great!

But anyway, hope that this post helps you, see you next time.