Changing the way you play guard

For the past couple of weeks we've been working specifically on turbocharging everyone's guard game. Rather than just look at lots of techniques we've been concentrating on how to keep a pressure game going and make people give you opportunities.

I've been breaking this down into 4 areas.

1) Mobility - Keep your hips working all the time, stay off your back, sit up and work with your arms and legs to make space. As part of this look at the following directions of movement to open up gaps (or slam them closed):

1. Lateral - keep your hips moving out to the sides
2. Longitudinal - keep moving in or out, getting underneath or making space to keep yourself safe
3. Elevation - Sit up and down, bump them with your hips, keep making a nuisance of yourself

2) Weight control - Whoever controls the weight controls the passes or sweeps. If they have control of their weight they will pin you and pass. If you have control you will carry them and sweep them. Use your movement and constant pushing, pulling, hooking and dragging with your arms and legs to keep them off balance. You should be aiming to make them fall into your subs and sweeps or just fall over completely.

3) Attack - Guard is a dominant position, although you wouldn' think so the way some people play it. From here you should be threatening with one of the following all the time:

• Sweep
• Submission
• Stand up

4) Recovery - Guard is hard to keep, you need to work at it. Don't just hang on and wait for the pass, work to claw back from every escape attempt. Work head control, knee insertion and foot hooking to keep resetting, retaking or transforming your guard to make it frustrating to work against.

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