Having Trouble Escaping Mount?

The hip escape, the elbow escape, the shrimp. Whatever you may choose to call it, it’s an absolute necessity in any BJJ practitioner’s game. It’s a fundamental movement, and the foundation for many escapes, and countless techniques. But, are we doing it right?

If you train BJJ, there’s a good chance you’ve escaped your hips down the length of the mat many times. But, when applying this to a live situation, what is a key element that may give us a higher success rate?

Let’s take the mount for instance. You’re stuck on the bottom(again), and you’re trying to keep yourself safe from the myriad of attacks being thrown at you. After you’ve gone through your mental checklist of defenses-- keeping the elbows tight, protecting the neck, etc.-- it’s time to make our escape. We hip escape to our side, and BOOM, your opponent modifies their mount, adjusting to your escape attempt and things may have gone from bad to worse. What went wrong?

Many times, when we use the hip escape, we don’t block both hips. Once we turn to the side we wish to escape to, our attention and frame tends to focus solely on the hip that is blocking our escape. This allows our opponent to move into a technical mount position, thus negating our hard work, and possibly ending up in a less favorable situation.

In this video Kurt Osiander demonstrates his answer to this fundamental flaw.

He uses his left hand to control the hip on the side he’s NOT escaping to. This keeps his partner from moving up and gaining ground in the mount. Kurt is able to stay one step ahead of his partners adjustments by applying this idea. Of course, in BJJ there are many ways to achieve the same goal, but Kurt has a great answer here that’s definitely worth a look!

So, next time you’re looking to make a smooth getaway from the bottom mount, make sure you keep both of your opponent’s hips at bay. If you can learn to be aware of this critical detail, it may just change your escape game forever!

For more game changing techniques from Kurt Osiander, check out "Fundamentals of a Jiu Jitsu Renegade" from BJJ Fanatics!  His easy to use and implement techniques are so old school, they're new school.  Don't miss out!

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