Revisiting the basics part 5: getting your hips underneath their hips

I started working some of the deep half guard over the last week. Yesterday with JS I was messing around with some of the entries from far away. I could definitely feel that my arms and my neck were vulnerable. It felt like trying to sprint off the trail in the woods and had to dodge branches coming from all directions.

But I did notice if I was able to get there, some sweeps were possible. Afterward we were discussing this type of half guard vs the Bear half guard which is more shifting the hips, trapping a side, then bridging. I feel that both are good sweeping systems with quite a lot in common.

In my efforts to tie things together, I started thinking that these sweeps are not just unique to half guard, as X guard, scissor sweeps, ankle sweeps and really almost all sweeps involve getting your hips underneath your opponent.

I thought about this more as I started trying to work more of an open guard against JS. I was putting up some barriers to his pass, but since he tends to keep his hips low and back, my barriers are ultimately ineffective.

The smarter gameplan would be either to disengage completely or to use a strategy that would cause him to want to move his hips forward. A good example of that might be the rolling knee bar. My instructor often mentions how he started to use the rolling knee bar when people became wary of his armlock from the guard.

One of the best defenses for the arm lock is to keep the hips back. However, when the hips are back, the legs are exposed to a degree. And when one starts to counter the legs, usually this involves moving their hips forward and inevitably up. The next move is to attack their base while still looking for submissions. And furthermore, you can get underneath their hips now, in order to do this.

While this might be a little more complicated example, a simpler version is the scissor sweep. Regardless of the variation that is taught, there is always the idea of pulling the opponent on top of you, i.e. getting his hips over yours, in order to do the sweep.

And looking back at times when a sweep works verses when it doesn’t, I’m seeing this hip principle is present much of the time. There are other factors of course, but it’s hard to get any sweep without this floating hip idea.