Developing your Guard Passing

Developing your guard passing is one of the most difficult parts of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.  Passing guard is an extremely daunting task, and can be impossible on someone with a good guard.  There are some ways you can improve your guard passing at a faster rate.

To improve your guard passing at a faster rate, try and develop a system of attacks that you always use.  What this means is you need to have “go to” passes and keep using them to see different reactions.  You want to have passes that are versatile, quick, and connect with each other.

Versatile Guard Passing

You want to develop your guard passing with versatility so you can implement the passes in gi, nogi, and in multiple guards.  To improve your passing faster, pick one or two good guard passes and work them every day to learn your opponent’s reaction.  We recently wrote an article on improving your bjj, if you want to check out some training strategies from it, click here.

When picking passes, try and pick some passes that work in gi, nogi, and from multiple guards.  For instance, the leg drag works well, knee slice, and X-pass.  These are all extremely versatile passes that work from several positions.  Some guards are more difficult to pass than others. Check out this video of a pass from single leg X Below.  This guard is difficult to pass because traditional passes do not work on it.

Quick Guard Passing

Quick and aggressive guard passes can be some of the best guard passes.  If you can beat your opponent to getting grips, you can apply passes fast and before they even establish a guard.  Once again, you want to have “go to” passes that you can implement often.  You also want to have guard passes that work in a lot of guards.

There are plenty of quick guard passes that you can do from various guards.  Some of those passes are the knee cut pass, the leg drags, the x-pass, and the stack pass.  These are all simple passes that you can initiate at the start of your roll and hit quick.  Check out this video below from Lucas Lepri on the knee cut pass.  This is probably the most popular pass in BJJ and he breaks it down extremely well.

Connecting Your Guard Passes

Connecting your guard passes is also an extremely important element of developing your guard passes.  You can start to develop a guard passing game by picking one pass and doing it all the time.  For example, let say you start to use the X-pass all the time than realize your opponent is giving you a reaction that presents a knee slide. 

You are learning how to connect your passes.  Now that you have started to X-pass, you have connected the knee slide based off your opponent’s reaction. Check out our article “Open Guard Passing” with Rodolfo Viera to learn some cool passes.  Also, check out this video of Leandro Lo passing 50/50 because this is another tricky position to deal with.

If you want to advance your guard passing at a fast rate, check out world champion, Leandro Lo’s 4 DVD set, “Matrix Guard Passing and the Lo Guard.” It is a great resource to see an abundance of high level passing.