Knee Bar From Over Under Passing by Gordon Ryan

The over under pass is likely one of the most popular No Gi passes among Jiu Jitsu practitioners at all levels.

Professor Bernardo Faria stated during his breakdown of the pass in his video instructional titled “No Gi Pressure Passing” that this pass accounts for between 70 to 80 percent of his No Gi Passing game.  When athletes at the highest levels are touting statistics like that, we should take heed and do a deep dive to best understand how we can add this to our game, refine the details and build confidence that we too can rely on this pass as a large portion of our No Gi passing game. 

While we may train the details of the pass over and over, drilling them into our brain, there may be a time when we still just simply can not get passed the opponent’s guard.  It’s always good to have a back up plan for times like this, so when I came across this Knee Bar from the Over Under Pass, I was certainly curious. Let’s break down this technique.

Starting from your standard over under position with one arm over hooking the opponent’s leg and one arm under hooking the opponent’s opposite leg, and on our knees.

In this situation you can see Gordon is unable to get his leg out from the guard entrapment.  At this point he simply locks a figure four grip with his legs and walks, on his knees toward the opponent’s foot on his knees, moving down the leg until he reaches a point where the opponent’s knee is at his outside hip.  Once he has achieved this position to finish it is as simple as spreading his knees out and pushing his hips towards the mat. This will put pressure on the opponent’s knee and allow you to finish the submission. 

That was easy, right?

But what if they defend it?  

If the opponent turns away from you, it will remove the ability to finish the knee bar, however, in doing so it also changes the direction of their hips and therefore allows us to complete the pass with little opportunity for the opponent to catch or trap our leg due to their now shifted hip positioning. 

But what if they lock their legs and prevent us from being able to extend their leg by walking down the leg to get their knee in our hip? 

If this happens, we simply move back to normal half guard passing.  As Gordon explains in his video clip, the goal here is to find the best way to get past his partners top leg, and top arm.  While the opponent’s legs being locked prevent us from being able to extend our legs to finish the knee bar or getting around the legs that way.  From here Gordon reaches over his opponent’s far leg and blocks the hip with his forearm and walks on his knees back to the opponent’s centerline.  Once this is achieved, he uses head control and bicep control to obtain inside position on his opponent and begin opening up his opponent and attacking.

Gordon goes on to show how to handle this situation if you have started the over under pass and the opponent locks their feet and prevents you from continuing the pass the way you had initially planned.  In this situation he shows bringing his under hooked arm out, using a combination of pulling and swimming, without taking too much pressure off of the opponent or turning too far exposing his back. Once he is able to get his arm out he simply puts his forearm on the mat along side his opponent’s hip (on the same side he originally had the under hook) and now uses this as an opportunity to begin setting up attacks.  From here he shows sitting to his hip and attacking the Kimura, using bicep and head control like mentioned above to open up the opponent and continue his half guard pass if he so chooses, among many other attacks that are now available to him since the opponent’s guard is no longer a threat because he was able to get above their outside hip and arm.  Check another course The Head Pressure Passing System by Matt Jubera.

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As we compare some of these top performing athletes, it’s common to see not only a lot of similarities, but also each of their own spin or approach to the “solution”.  Obviously we know that the techniques we learn in Jiu Jitsu work at a fundamental level, so long as we are using all of the details we learned. As we develop our game, much like these athlete, just at a slower pace typically, we start to build off of these fundamental techniques and build our own “game”.  I think as we do this it’s extremely important to study some of the best grapplers out there. While there are many elite athletes in our sport, they all have a slightly different game, they identify problems differently, and therefore typically come up with a different solution to the problem than the other person would have.  The goal as we start build and continue to build our game is to be able to look at each problem through a few different lenses, understanding how Bernardo Faria may approach this problem verses how Tom DeBlass may approach the problem and why.  

Gordon’s video instructionals never fail to provide intense detail backed by reasoning in a teaching method that is easy to understand and apply.  Having studied with Professor Danaher, Gordon has adopted a “systematic” approach to Jiu Jitsu, taking the guesswork out of the sport. If the opponent does X, he does Y, following the system to a tee.  If you want to dive deeper into guard passing and develop the ability to blow past anyone’s guard check out Gordon’s latest video instructional titled “Systematically Attacking The Guard” to start understanding the system and building it into your game.  This instructional is packed with over 10 hours of tips tricks and secrets previously reserved for only the elite athletes lucky enough to have the opportunity to train with Gordon and his team mates.

 

Check out Gordon’s “Systematically Attacking the Guard”, and while you are at it, you should probably pick up “Getting Swole As A Grappler” his complete meal plan and workout strategy that allowed him to pack on insane amounts of muscle and functional strength.  Besides, does anyone not want to be shredded? Yeah…. Didn’t think so.

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