Taking a Stop At The North South Butcher Shop With Neil Melanson

 

When you watch many high level Jiu Jitsu practitioners demonstrate techniques, you really start to build up quite the repertoire of creative techniques. You could watch 5 people all demonstrate the same submission and pick up a new trick from each of them. The power of the internet and the roaring popularity of Jiu Jitsu in recent times has been a blessing for those in the community.

Sometimes it's easy to forget how truly lucky we are in terms of all the material available to help practitioners progress their game. To have the option to choose from the comfort of your own home which professional athlete to learn from is really astonishing. Pick something you want to work on, and put the time into it.

One technique in particular that once you get there is extremely effective is the north south choke. The choke incorporates a wide range of techniques such as maintaining and adjusting your position in side control. The key to the north south choke is leverage, and there are a few different ways to maximize it.

In this video, Neil Melanson demonstrates a north south choke, which he calls the “butcher shop” since it incorporates the use of the knee, check it out below!

 

Technique Breakdown

Neil begins the video by explaining whenever he uses a knee in his techniques he ends up calling it a butcher shop, hence the name butcher shop north south choke. I suppose you can guess that this choke is going to involve the use of the knee!

Neil starts by getting into what he refers to as the “one in one out” position. Typically you will start from side control to get here, but it's a similar concept as a triangle choke where you want one arm in and one arm out. Once you transition up behind the head of your partner, you want one of your arms to be on the inside of one of your partner's arms, and one on the outside. The purpose for doing this in a triangle choke is to have one of your partner's shoulders blocking their carotid artery, and the concept is similar for this technique.

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Once in the one in one out position, you are going to place your inside arm under your partner's shoulder, and your outside arm will grip his tricep. When your grips are in place you are going to start to apply forward pressure onto your partner's body, which will start to lift his head off of the mat. As his head lifts up, you are going to slide your knee up behind his head to keep it raised. When his head is raised, take your outside arm under his head and feed it to your other arm which is under your partner’s shoulder. This arm is now wrapped around one side of your partner’s neck blocking off his carotid artery.

After feeding one arm to the other, you can choose to lock it up with either a gable or an S grip. From here you are going to slide your knee up from the back of his head and on to his neck. As soon as you get here all you should need is a little pressure from the knee and you should have no problem getting the tap. While the knee does block the other carotid artery, due to the large amount of pressure you can utilize from here it can also serve as more of a crank submission than a choke. As you push your knee down, you are also severely tightening the grip you have around the other side of his neck.

In a competitive atmosphere, you often see and hear people saying that they will not tap to pain, only if they are about to go out. This is definitely the case, but with a choke like this people may be reconsidering that idea. This can be a brutal choke and if done correctly you are almost certain to get the tap one way or another.

About Neil Melanson

Neil Melanson is an American grappling coach who currently serves as the head coach at Jaco Hybrid Training Center. He specializes in catch wrestling, and adds elements of Judo and Jiu Jitsu into his grappling. Neil has trained under some of the best in the grapplers world, and has coached a long list of high level MMA fighters and wrestlers. Neil also spent seven years in the United States Navy, and five years as a Special Agent for the Federal Air Marshals. 

Neil Melanson’s Instructional 

In this particular instructional, Neil focuses on arm triangle choke mastery. He covers techniques including shoulder lock from Kesa Gatame, full guard arm triangle, butterfly sweep to arm triangle, Von Flue choke, and so much more.

The fundamental idea behind arm triangles brings so much possibility to modify and become creative in submissions. Neil is an expert grappler with the track record to prove it and he does just this. Don’t waste another second to learn all that he has to offer, check out his instructional here!

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