If you want to get better at BJJ, you must understand the basic principles & concepts of BJJ.
You also must learn how to apply them in a live grappling situation.
One great thing about these principles & concepts is that you can use them in various situations.
There are many of them, and this one I’m going to talk about may be my most favorite BJJ concept ever.
Imagine your opponent is trying to pin you down from the side control position. And you hide your arms underneath their body by bringing your elbows to your torso and your hands to your face/neck.
At this point, you can bridge to lift your opponent. You leave your arms connected to your opponent’s body, and you MOVE AWAY from your opponent by shrimping.
Your arms act as a frame to STOP your opponent from following you.
You don’t need to push your opponent away with your arm strength, which is counterproductive, especially if you’re rolling against someone bigger than you.
All you need to do here is, I repeat, to stop your opponent from following you… so you can MOVE AWAY.
Moving away gets you the same result as pushing your opponent away with brute force. But it requires much less energy.
I’ll phrase this differently.
Basically, what you want here is to create some distance between you and your opponent. You can spend all your energy to move your opponent by pushing them.
But instead of doing that, you can move away from your opponent to achieve the same result with the help of the frame you have.
If you’ve never come across this idea before, try and use it in a live roll. This will help you save energy.
p.s. A slightly different example, but here’s a video where I talk about using a frame to stop your opponent from completing their guard passing attempt. If you’re not on Instagram and you cannot see this video, please let me know. I’ll upload it to YouTube as well so you can watch it.