Use This Drill For A Better Butterfly Guard With Thomas Lisboa

By Fanatics Authors, June 24, 2020

Many BJJ players agree that drilling is one of the best ways to enhance your skills and create that crucial muscle memey in our bodies that we all hope to attain. Becoming proficient with particular movements can be incredibly helpful, especially when you start to see these newly acquired skills pop out during your live training sessions and save the day. Many high level BJJ athletes credit much of their success to this sort of repetitious drilling and with proven results at the highest levels it’s easy to see why!

Let's take the butterfly guard for instance. It can be tough to navigate at first. With its open nature and level of unpredictability, many of us spend our first experiences in the position getting our guard passed, while trying to get a handle on the themes of the guard itself. Once we gain an understanding, the butterfly guard becomes tons of fun and we can begin reversing, transitioning, and submitting with confidence.

Multiple time IBJJF gold medalist and Fabio Gurgel black belt Thomas Lisboa has a phenomenal butterfly guard game and he’s recently released an entire series dedicated to the butterfly guard. In Butterfly Guard: Beyond the Basics, Lisboa is providing a blueprint on how to effectively use the position, with instruction on tons of reversals, submissions, and transitions. If you’re a fan of the position, Lisboa has you covered.

So, back to this drilling thing... In the new instructional, Lisboa also provides some great drills for the butterfly guard. These will help you to understand the position a little better and create some familiarity with proper angles, elevation, and getting the most out of your butterfly guard movement. Here’s an example that you can check out and implement right away. Take a look at this excerpt from the series where Lisboa reveals one of these drills! Check it out!

Setting up in the butterfly guard, Lisboa takes an under hook and positions his body so that one knee is making contact with the mat. On the same side he posts his hand. Think of a technical get-up position. He then looks to collect his partners near arm with an over hook. Next, Lisboa begins to fall to his side. This is an important detail. Many times, this is where things go wrong. Especially as beginners, we tend to pull our training partner’s on top of us. This makes it tough to load up their weight properly. This drill will help you make this idea more automatic. As Lisboa continues, he elevates his partner slightly with his butterfly hook and then sets him back down. He then returns to a posted hand and begins to perform the movement on the opposite side.

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There’s a huge theme at work here that's detrimental to any butterfly sweep attempt. It will never serve you during this type of sweep to fall backward and load the full weight of your partner onto your butterfly hook. Remember we are trying to compromise our opponent’s base and create an angle that gives them very little options to recover.

Using this drill, you can make this idea more familiar to your brain and body and make sure that when you're hunting for that reversal, you're doing everything in your power to be successful! You’ll find this drill among others as well as an entire library of phenomenal butterfly guard options in this series to help you create a more solid and dangerous butterfly guard game!

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