Gracie Submission Essentials

Growing up at the Gracie Academy in Rio I learned a lot from everyone, but my main influences were my father Helio and my brothers Rolls and Rickson. They each had their own style but I liked Rolls’ game a lot so I molded my style after his. Rolls had a very aggressive attacking style with lots of movement and I liked that. He liked to play the top game and his body type was very similar to mine. Rolls was the biggest influence in my style of jiu-jitsu, bigger than even Rickson. As far as being a fan of the sport Rickson and my father are my two idols, but Rolls was the person whose style I admired most and tried to emulate.

Matches and fights today have time restrictions, so I had to adapt my fight game for that. My father believes in waiting for an opponent’s mistakes and then attacking the errors. He doesn’t prepare an ambush but rather waits for an opportunity. Since the majority of my fights involved time limits, I had to adapt and adjust in order to succeed. I am more aggressive than my father because it is my nature. I like to prepare an ambush by squeezing my opponent and seeing what he gives me. This works best as a blend of technical knowledge and attack combination variations that force my opponent to panic and give me what I want.

My father likes to say that to be successful in defense you need to counter the attack before it starts. If you wait to defend the attack itself you are already too late. Defense is always a shorter and faster movement than an attack so it is more efficient. The timing of a counter is always shorter than the timing of an attack. When attacking you always have to set up the attack, so the timing is longer and the movements more complex. So in order to finish someone you need to feint your opponent and be faster and more technical than him. You need to have everything work perfectly in order to break him down. The fact that defense is more efficient forces the attacker to be better in every aspect to succeed. Attack combinations and sequences are the best way to submit your opponent. But if you want to submit someone, you have to have a strong defense. Only then can you be confident your opponent won’t beat you and you can relax and concentrate on seeing his mistakes.

I like to use attack sequences where I know what my opponent’s options are so I can best anticipate his reactions and counters. I try to predict which are his most common escape options and then create a sequence of three or four linked moves based on my expectations of his counters. As I fight, I use different single attacks to pick up on what my opponent’s defensive preferences are. Since there’s more than one way to counter an attack, I probe my opponent to see what his tendencies are - which escapes he does best and which ones he isn’t comfortable with. Once I have that information, I try to guide my attacks and my game to go to the positions where his escapes are weakest and force him to use the ones that he doesn’t like. I basically select a variation of the attack combination that leads to his weakest escapes and also leads to my strongest attacks.

For example, if I am mounted and you use the elbow escape more often than the upa, I know that is your preference. So the next time I mount, I am going to concentrate on defending the elbow escape and forcing you to use the upa and take advantage of your weakness there. Or I may take the other option: knowing that you like to use the elbow escape, I will select an attack that takes advantage of your escape choice such as an Ezequiel choke. With the knowledge of an opponent’s preferences, you will find that you can corner your opponent into a dead end where he has to give you something that you already know is coming. This is a devastating advantage that will lead to his submission and your victory.

Royler Gracie’s newest book, “Gracie Submission Essentials” by Helio and Royler Gracie, published by Invisible Cities Press, is available from www.bjjmart.com or www.jiujitsuprogear.com.