Maximizing Your Attacking Efficiency

Over the years of practicing jiu jitsu, there have been many lessons that show themselves through pure experience alone. Whether or not you develop the knowledge based on being taught by someone or your own personal revelation can vary, but the time on the mats usually shows you useful concepts if you have an open mind and open eyes. A couple of the things that have stood out the most to maximize the efficiency of an attack are forcing reactions and manipulating alignment to the isolated joint/area.

Let’s take a look at what this means in more detail.

Reactionary based attacks cause the opponent to not on defend the attack, but also defend for control of their body positioning. If you were to knock someone off balance or even cause them to reposition their body to maintain stable, you have forced the individual to compensate for your own movement. By taking this idea into mind, you can begin to develop a series of expected reactions that are directly related to the specific push or pull you perform to your opponent. Think of one of the most fundamental sweeps from inside of the guard; the hip heist/bump sweep. This move causes the opponent’s base to collapse because they cannot post out their arm or leg in the direction that they are being pushed.

When removing a piece of this movement, such as the control of the opponent’s arm, you can see that most of the time the opponent will use that as a tool to prevent the sweep. Now depending on where the arm gets placed, you can attack or redirect your attack to a newly opened option. If the opponent posts near with good posture, the neck is open for attack. If the opponent posts far, there is now an opening to climb for a floating triangle. If they hunker down their posture, the opportunity to swivel to attack the arm is now open. Finding common reaction-based themes for a position can open up an easy way to read an opponent and also create a flow chart-like game plan.

Whenever you are attempting to sweep or off-balance an opponent, you force your opponent into your game. This can be the time to capitalize on their mistakes and short-comings.

Now moving onto the concept of manipulating alignment. In every individual, the alignment of their body effects the level of power they can produce and their ability to move efficiently. By taking their body out of alignment, one can immediately reduce their opponent’s ability to be successful with their movement. This is what we always attempt to do when we isolate and control a limb before attacking it. It is always why we try to immobilize the hips or the shoulders; it exponentially cuts the opponent’s power down.

Something as simple as lifting or bending your opponent's head off of center line can be enough to cause this reduction in power.

Another part of manipulating alignment is added stress to a joint that is being attacked. By pushing or pulling the opposite sides of the joint, an abnormal stress gets applied to the joint causing it to become damaged faster. The same goes for twisting the pushed/pulled portions to create a tremendous amount of torque. This pressure maximizes the lethality of the submission.