dealing with the 10%

Had a good training session today with TO. His defense and calmness is at such a level, that it shuts down submissions. I wrote about the 10% concept a while back and he definitely personifies that. It takes a lot of discipline to not reach out and try to grab what seems right in front of you. Many times I’ve thought I had a triangle or some other submission and burned myself out trying to finish it.

Today I found myself working on two ideas that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. The first idea is the tug of war. It’s basically where you pull the rope just enough to get the other guy to give a mighty tug then you let go just as he’s pulling his hardest and he falls on his butt.

I’ve found this idea works well with bigger and stronger guys. I am not going to be able to stop their movement, but with barriers that are solid enough, I can usually tell where they are going to go. I give enough resistance to make them really push, then suddenly no resistance. The important thing here is to have a follow up in mind that you can start working on right as they’re moving into the position they were just fighting for. The cool thing is it can make you seem much faster than you actually are because you’re timing their movement.

The second idea has a subtler element to it. Let’s say I get a triangle on someone that appears to be on pretty well. The legs are figure foured but maybe their elbow is glued to my hip and I can’t spin to a more perpendicular angle for whatever reason. The temptation has always been to power through this and just crunch down, pull the head and squeeze. Sometimes this works and other times it doesn’t. Many times I can’t really tell why it does and why it doesn’t.

What I’m realizing though is that submission attempt is leaving other submissions open. The arm with the elbow planted on the hip is strong in preventing itself from being pushed across his body. Even if you bridge up and push, a good player is expecting and waiting for this. But it you bridge and scoop under the wrist instead, he now has a new problem. That firmly planted elbow is now an anchor for me to move his wrist towards that direction and start working a kimura type lock. Now if he releases his pin on the hips I now have a much easier time pushing it across the body.

I like the idea of steadily making my opponent’s options worse and their life more complicated. Good defense can shut down one attack, but it almost invariably opens up another one. My goal is to start seeing what those other attacks are and start working them. It may leave the original attack open or it may make yet another attack option appear. This may only be something I can do against people closer to my own size but it’s like a smaller chain of subission attempts.