Closed guard, and what the locked ankles buy

Stephan Kesting and Elliott Bayev's glossary of guards on Grapplearts opens its list with the basic closed guard and says of it: "This is the style of guard most often taught to beginners, and it is still effective at the highest levels of competition." That is two instructors' statement, not a survey of rooms, and we know of no count that would confirm or correct it. The question here is why a position would earn that place, and what it charges for it.

Kesting's summary of his own closed guard material has it as the guard in which "your legs are typically locked around your opponent's torso with your ankles crossed", with the pointed addition that "If your feet are dangling at your opponent's hips then you're NOT in the closed guard." The lock is the position, and this note asks what it does to each of the two people involved.

The Technique Library's entry on the posture battle is the reference for how the exchange inside the guard is fought. This piece is about the terms on which it is fought, and its argument is ours.

The IBJJF rule book defines a guard by its job. Under article 4.2, guard is "the use of one or more legs to block the opponent from reaching side-control or north-south position", and a guard pass, worth three points, is scored when the top athlete "manages to surmount the legs of the opponent in bottom position" and holds side control or north-south for three seconds. Legs locked behind the top player's back cannot be surmounted from inside the loop, so the pass acquires a step that comes before it: the guard has to be opened.

Kesting, writing as the passer, says that when it comes to passing the closed guard "one of the hardest things is to actually break the damn thing open in the first place". He also gives the bottom player's view: a skilled opponent keeps the guard closed because "he knows that if he opens up his legs then it's just become that much easier to pass!" And once it is open, his answer to which pass to use is "any of them!" Those three remarks describe a gate, with one job in front of it and the whole passing game behind it.

BJJ Mental Models sorts guards by mechanism and files closed guard, with half guard, as clamp-based, a guard in which "you are tethering yourself to your opponent and hindering your opponent's movement". What is being hindered, on our reading, is the top player's hips. Kesting describes the guard from inside as "clamped onto your waist or torso". A passer whose waist is held cannot step their hips around a leg or back out to a distance. Their remaining choices concern their own spine and arms, and how to get the ankles uncrossed.

That is the first half of the case for teaching it early, and it is our inference, not Kesting's. In an open guard the bottom player is managing distance, which way they are facing, which points of contact they hold and which guard those contacts add up to. The lock holds distance and facing roughly constant, and what is left is small enough to name.

The first variable is the top player's posture. The Library entry treats it as the position's real contest: if the top player keeps head above shoulders and shoulders above hips, the bottom player's attacks "are not being defended so much as they are being made unavailable". Kesting's list agrees on the tools, "You need to control his posture using both your legs and your arms", and singles out the legs: "Pulling your legs towards your own chest is a very important part of controlling/breaking his posture." Jason Scully, in a guest article on the same site, is blunter about pulling with the hands alone: "Your hands against his whole body are not an even battle."

The second is the bottom player's own angle. Kesting: "Most closed guard offense (other than a few chokes) relies on your hips NOT being flat." The Library's submission entries each say it for their own technique: the armbar entry has the hips travelling out and back in on an angle, the triangle entry moves them out to the side of the trapped arm, and the guillotine entry puts them out before the extension.

So a beginner in closed guard has two questions to answer, in order. Is their posture broken? Am I off square? That is a short enough list to hold in a live round, and it is our best account of why the position suits the role the glossary gives it.

A clamp works in both directions. In the BJJ Mental Models wording the thing tethered is yourself, and the same page adds that clamp-based guards "can be risky because they may allow your opponent to lift you up or pressure you with weight". Hips fastened to an opponent's waist go where that waist goes.

Compare the open guard part of the Grapplearts glossary. Once the legs are no longer locked, "the options and possibilities expand considerably". The spider guard "controls the opponent while your hips remain free", and the butterfly guard moves smoothly to other positions "because your legs are not locked in place". Free hips are what all of that runs on, and the Library's retention entry says so from the losing side: "Retention is a hip problem that presents as a leg problem." Closed guard does not ask a beginner to solve that problem yet, because the lock has taken both sets of hips out of circulation.

The cost shows up when the second variable is needed. An angle is a movement of the hips, and the lock resists exactly that. Kesting calls "Getting a foot on your opponent's hip, turning 90 degrees and clamping down on your opponent's body with your other leg" a critical move for many closed guard attacks. Scully describes putting a foot on the ground to help scoot the hips out, then getting the legs tight around the opponent again. Both describe loosening the lock to buy an angle. On our reading that is the position's central trade.

The lock also depends on the bodies involved. Against someone big or thick around the middle, Kesting writes, "it really can be difficult to cross your ankles and properly set the closed guard position", and his advice is to move to half guard or an open guard. And when the top player stands, he notes, "hanging off someone's body with your crossed ankles can be very tiring for your legs". The Library is direct about that moment: a standing opponent has already won the posture exchange, and the choice is to open on your own terms or commit to a sweep.

In the gi, the posture half of the problem has a specialist tool. Kesting's list of closed guard grips begins with "the classic sleeve and collar grip", and his passing articles describe what a deep collar grip does to the person inside the guard: "With a high cross lapel your opponent can always pull your head forward, making it hard to establish posture". A handful of cloth behind the neck holds posture down from a distance, with one arm, while the bottom player's hips and other hand stay free to work on the angle.

No-gi rules remove it. The IBJJF lists as a serious foul in no-gi, at 6.2.2 N, "when an athlete grabs hold of his/her uniform or that of his/her opponent in any way", and the ADCC's list of illegal techniques includes holding the T-shirt or shorts. What remains is the body. Scully, whose sixteen tips are offered as "especially helpful with no-gi", works through it: control the head, then an arm or a shoulder with an overhook or an underhook, and pull in with the legs.

Those controls change the bargain. A collar grip holds posture at arm's length. A head and an arm, or an overhook, holds it chest to chest, and uses the bottom player's arms and upper body to do it. The first variable now costs more of the bottom player's own freedom, and the second has to be found while staying attached. Scully's image for doing both is a boa constrictor, "always on the move but staying tight at the same time". The Library's instruction to pull with the legs before the arms carries more weight here, because the legs are the posture tool the missing jacket did not take. That is our argument; none of the sources states it in this form.

A position that holds two people still invites both of them to leave it that way, and the IBJJF rule book addresses each in turn. Article 6.2.1 defines lack of combativeness as one athlete "clearly not pursuing positional progression", and two of its four listed examples are set in closed guard. One is the top athlete who "does not seek to pass guard and at the same time prevents the opponent from seeking positional progression from guard". The other is the bottom athlete who "wraps his/her arms around the opponent's back or performs any other controlling movement clutching the opponent to him/her without intending to achieve a submission or score". The examples are described as "merely illustrative". Under 7.3.1 the referee counts twenty consecutive seconds before signalling the penalty.

Read the second example next to the previous section. Arms around the back, clutching the opponent, is close to a description of the no-gi posture hold. The rule does not penalise the hold. It penalises the hold "without intending to achieve a submission or score". The difference between control and stalling, as printed, is whether the second variable ever arrives.

The ADCC rules are less specific. The page does not use the words closed guard at all, and its passivity clause names no position: "A passive fighter will be warned twice and then will be punished by minus point." Scully's last tip suggests the temptation is familiar without any rule book: "Too many people use the closed guard to just hold their opponent and stall."

The locked ankles buy a great deal: an opponent whose hips are held, a pass that cannot start until a gate is opened, and a problem reduced to posture and angle. They are paid for with the bottom player's mobility, with a dependence on the two bodies involved and, without a jacket, with arms that are busy holding. The Library's entry says closed guard "looks like control but is only an attachment". It is a good place to learn what posture and angle are. The open guards are where the hips that were lent to the lock get used again.