All About The Torreando Pass

What can we really say about guard passing?  It’s fundamental… refusing to recognize this, and dedicate the appropriate attention to not only guard retention for your game, but guard passing is well, suicide.  We must give guard passing the attention it deserves. 

It certainly does not take long in Jiu Jitsu training for you to start to understand the importance of passing the guard.  It is likely that from day one you start learning a couple of passes, generally it will be one to go over the legs, something like the knee slice and one to go under the legs like a stack pass or something like that.  What you will soon realize is that these are simply two of what seems like millions of options when it comes to getting around the guard.  

These two guard passes do however teach the basic concepts necessary to pass your opponent’s guard.  The reality of the guard is that there are only two ways through it, either going over the legs, or under them.  I suppose you could break the leg in half and go through it that way too, but that’s not exactly encouraged as good sportsman like conduct in most matches.  

It is important that we always continue to explore other techniques, whether it be passing or attacking whatever the case may be.  The thing is, we have to have at least a basic understanding of what the opponent is looking to do in order to be able to stop it and or reverse it depending on the situation.  Understanding how to pass someone’s guard using a multitude of options gives you the advantage when it comes to guard retention because you then know exactly what they are looking for and can likely be one step ahead of them in shutting down whatever they are trying to do.

A common pass used often by grapplers at all levels is the Toreando pass.  Jason Hunt is going to break down all of the details as well as the tips and tricks about this pass in his video clip titled “All about the Toreando Pass”

Before we dive into the pass, let’s give Jason Hunt a proper introduction, in case you are not familiar with who he is, or why you should be following his advice when there are so many instructors out there.

Jason is a Black Belt under Justin Flores and boasts several achievements such as being a national Judo champion, receiving 3rd place in World Jiu Jitsu Pro, Pan American Championships and Abu Dhabi World Pro Trials.  Jason has trained both Jiu Jitsu and Judo since he was a child and shifted his focus to solely Jiu Jitsu around 2008.  

While it Is one thing to have great achievements in your own personal Jiu Jitsu competition career, it becomes a different ball game when we start talking about your successes as a coach.  Jason is the coach to 2 world champions currently, Edwin Najmi and Gabriel Arges. The ability to win personally is an incredible feat and certainly deserves to be respected, but when you add in the ability to teach others to do the same, it puts you on a different level.  

Bernardo goes as far as to say that Jason is well known in the Jiu Jitsu community as the guy who knows every single move in Jiu Jitsu and every possibility from each position.

 

To start Jason’s opponent is laying on his back playing an open guard while Jason is standing in front of him but dropping his level to be close to the feet rather than standing tall where he has to travel a long distance to get to the opponent’s legs.

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Before we move on, Jason wants us to start with the right mindset.  If we start our thinking that we have to get to the opponent’s head, that’s a very long way to go and can be extremely challenging.  Starting out low with the mindset that we just need to get to the opponent’s hips, it makes it a much more realistic challenge.  

In order to best approach this, we want to start out low with the intent of getting control of the ankles and working our way up.  If we come in high, we set ourselves up for issues in dealing with a defensive pass because the opponent can and likely will get control of our sleeves and start to get their feet in the game to make our life more difficult.  

As we approach, again, with a low level, we are looking to reach in between the legs and control the opponent’s hip.  As we reach in with our hand we need to also follow with the same side leg. The goal is to get our hand on the opponent’s hip and connect our elbow to out knee on the same side.  When we do this and we drop our elbow down, rather than keeping it extended, it is more difficult for the opponent to lasso their foot in.  

The goal as we come in is to keep our elbow low by changing our distance between us and the opponent.  This will allow us to adjust as the opponent attempts to lasso or do anything else for that matter.  

Once we obtain control over the opponent’s hip by basing our right hand on the opponent’s hip.  As we obtain this we continue to move and adjust to whatever the opponent is doing at the time. When the opportunity presents itself, we can step back, ensuring we do not lose connection with the opponent’s hip.  As we step back we are looking to push the opponent’s knee to the other side of our body (past our center line) by combination of moving our body and moving their legs. We can push the opponent’s legs to the side with our left hand as we move around their legs. 

When we are looking to move around the legs we are backstepping and then bringing our knee under the outside of the opponent’s leg near the back of their knee so that we can drive the opponent’s legs to the other side.   Once we get to this position, we can start to work to get side control or knee on belly depending on what the opponent does. The important thing here is that we focus on getting the opponent’s legs past our center line in order to execute the pass effectively.  

As you can see Jason takes a simplistic, yet highly effective approach to the toreando pass.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective, it simply needs to be repeatable, easy to understand, and something you can execute time and time again.  

Jason’s 4 volume series titled “Everyday Half Guard Destruction” is exactly what you need to take your guard passing to the next level.  More times than not your opponent may be trying to play half guard rather than open guard.  We see this in some of the greatest competitors of all time. There is no disputing the favoritism that half guard gets at all levels, so why not be prepared with a few tools in your arsenal to blow through even the toughest half guards?

Now is your chance to study the most effective guard passes against half guard which has rapidly become one of the favorite positions of todays grapplers.  The tips and techniques in this video will provide you with hours of details that will have you blazing through, or past your opponent’s guard in no time at all.  It’s time to get to work, get your video instructional today and you can have a new trick or two up your sleeve before live training at your academy tonight.

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