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In The Arena Blog

How to Break a Lapel Guard Grip

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These days all kinds of different lapel guards are being played, which can be very frustrating if you don’t know how to deal with them. Jiu Jitsu Coach Ryan Fortin is here to help, and in this video he shows a nice effective way to break a lapel guard grip so you can start passing those lapel guards.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Coach Ryan Fortin:
What’s up everyone. Coach Ryan “Rattlesnake” Fortin here from The Arena. We’ve got Glen Hall, one of our black belts. And I’m going to show you guys the tip of the week.

A lot of guys, especially higher level guys, are playing lapel style guard. They’re using this to break the posture down, wrapping it around their legs so it makes it difficult, and then they can go ahead and continue to sweep. Worm guard, that’s becoming very popular these days. So you’re going to encounter this.

How can we stop it? We need to break the grip, okay? Now what I see a lot of times when people are trying to break the grip, they’re just trying to posture like this and that’s not really going to help you that much. Okay, now give it back to that hand. Okay, what I want to do, the most efficient thing, is pull the lapel through the fingers, okay? So I’ve got a nice slick chance, if they start playing traditional worm guard on you, and they pass the hand. And once they pass it to this one, that’s the opportunity you have to reach down, find that little tail and pull it out through the fingers, okay? One more time. He’s got it. He passes it. My lapels down, I’m going to reach down, find that tail, pull it out through the hands, and hopefully that’ll help you get past them worm guards.

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