I want to give you a quick tip that will help you improve your skills, especially guard passing skills.
But before that, here’s a quick observation.
Most people give up too quickly when their guard passing doesn’t seem to be working. So, instead of leaning in and onto their opponent, they move away.
This is okay if you intend to pass your opponent’s guard based on your speed.
But if you want to use passes like the knee cut and the smash pass, retreating doesn’t help you. You are likely to fail to generate the pressure you need.
What should you do, then?
You need to commit to your guard passing and go forward. You need to learn to stay in a seemingly awkward/uncomfortable position where you feel like your opponent could off balance you and do all sorts of bad things to you.
The key here is to learn how to stay safe while putting your body weight as much as possible onto your opponent from an angle that is disadvantageous to them.
If you know when you are safe, you will feel more comfortable and confident about holding your ground. How do you learn this? By trials and errors in sparring. A boring answer, I know. But it’s a cold hard truth.
And remember, sparring is where you can and should experiment with all sorts of situations so you won’t have to worry about them in actual matches.
Put that pressure against your opponent and commit to passing the guard.
p.s. One of the best examples of what I’m talking about in this email is hands down Lucas Lepri. Watch this highlight video of Lepri and see how he’s always creating forward pressure.