Tonight my couple clients returned for the first lesson in a new 10-hour course on submission grappling. They have trained with me since 2019 across a wide range of disciplines. The current focus is guard work, split into three ranges. Tonight we worked on mid-range guard passing.

This week my couple client completed their latest 10-hour course in submission grappling. The theme was passing mid-range guards. That means dealing with the awkward space where the bottom person still has useful legs, frames, grips, and angles, but the top person is close enough to apply pressure and start breaking those defences down.

The closed guard can become a holding position. That is useful for slowing a fight down, but it is not enough. A good guard should threaten reversals. It should make the person on top defend their posture, hands, knees, and hips.

Guard passing gets messy when you treat every guard the same. That was the big theme in the eighth lesson of my couple client’s Submission Grappling course. We came back to guard passing, but this time we didn’t start with a single pass. We started with distance.

In this post, I want to share how we worked on transitioning between submissions, specifically around necktie attacks, and how this can improve your grappling game while deepening your partnership.