5 Tips to Pass Any No Gi Guard! With Lachlan Giles

By Fanatics Authors, November 04, 2019

No gi guard passing can put us into a tailspin pretty quickly. When you’ve got a proficient guard player in your path and things have become a bit slippery, the challenges we face become greater and more difficult. We have fewer anchoring points in a no gi setting and this makes things very different from the gi where we can find that material and latch on. The way we position our body and distribute weight and pressure becomes very important here without the luxury of grips, and this is something we must keep in mind.

So, what are some concepts we can adhere to, to help us devour a good no gi guard and continue on our way to victory? Lachlan Giles has some great pointers for you on this exact subject. Here, he gives us 5 tips to pass any no gi guard. Bold claim? Absolutely, and we love it. Let’s get right to it!

1 - The Approach

As we begin to advance to pass the guard, we will have to make the important choice of where to first make contact with our opponents’ body. Giles advises us to first control the shins. His goal is to make sure that the guard player does not make contact with his body using their feet. This immediately gives them an advantage and the ability to create distance. Addressing a common error here, Giles demonstrates how controlling at the knees instead of the shins can afford his partner the ability to pommel and shed his controls. Notice also that Giles isn’t just pushing downward on the legs, he’s also pushing outward a bit to restrict the mobility in the legs. Giles then creates an angle, bypassing the legs and settling in to a knee slice passing posture and we’re ready to move on!

2 - Inside Positioning of the Legs

As Giles continues, he shows us how to claim the inside space with his legs. In no gi as we discussed earlier, space comes at a premium and having all your hard work undone during a passing procedure can be incredibly defeating. Look at how Giles positions his left leg, pinning the knee with his own knee and at the lower end, using his instep to elevate and trap his partner’s bottom leg. This is an interesting detail and one that would serve us well here. His body and opposite leg are taking care of his partners top leg. He’s simply in the way, providing pressure and blocking his partners efforts to extend or use the limb with any real effectiveness.

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3 - Upper Body Control

With the lower half taken care of, Giles can now turn his attention to the upper body. Giles gives us a gem here where grip fighting is concerned. He positions his arm behind his back and only exposes his hand which is poised and ready to achieve a grip as his partner begins to reach for him. As his partner looks to win the grip fight, he is only met with an open hand and ends up handing over his wrist, initially losing the grip fight. This takes away any surface area that the bottom player may use to establish a frame. This little detail gets Giles in close to the body where he’s now another step closer to completing the guard pass.

4 - Control the Hips

Guilty as charged. We tend to get greedy at these later stages of passing. We’ve conquered the legs and managed to get ourselves tight to the upper body, only to forget about the lower body. And as we begin completing the guard pass, our partner makes a shift of the hips and dismantles our hard work up to this point.

Giles keeps his far arm low. Even if he has claimed the under-hook space here, He makes sure to control the hip as he passes over the guard. He knows that as he completes the pass the guard payer is going to make a play at one last powerful hip escape or bridging motion, and keeping the focus here on the hip will help to quell these efforts and assist him solidifying the pass.

5 - Use the Threat of Submissions

When were passing, the guard player becomes very focused on stopping the pass itself. When you begin to mix int eh threat of submissions, the focus often changes tot eh submission threat and this allows us to continue passing with greater ease. As Giles demonstrates, using a heel hook to coax his partner in to giving up that critical inside position or a guillotine to eliminate the hands and finish a pass, the submission can be used in tandem with passing to bring forth some great results. Worst case scenario? You get the sub instead of the pass. Ill take it.

There is a treasure chest of useful information here. Giles has laid out a beautiful road map here to help us stay the course. Stick to the pointers when trying to pass the no gi guard and you’ll find yourself cutting through even the most active guards in the academy! Good luck!

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