Over, under or around: the ways past the legs

A beginner on top meets guard passing as a list of names: toreando, knee cut, double under, leg drag, over-under. The names say little about what the passes have in common, and the list keeps growing. One way to shrink it is to ask a plainer question of each pass: which way past the legs does it go?

The clearest written answer we found is in an article by Denis Kang and Stephan Kesting, posted on Grapplearts under a 2012 date and marked there as first published in Grappling Magazine in October 2005: "Fundamentally there are 3 kinds of guard passes: you can pass over, under or around his legs." The sentence comes at the end of a sequence. "Guard passing is a multi-stage process", they write. A closed guard has to be opened, the passer has to establish some control over the hips and legs, and only then does the pass go over, under or around.

Their article is about passing where strikes are allowed, a setting this piece does not take up. Only the count and the stages are used here. The count is theirs. What we do with it is ours: we use the route to tell a beginner what each pass has to beat, and we connect it to what the person underneath is doing in the retention pieces.

Neither of the two rule books read for this piece has a view on the route. The IBJJF's article 4.2 awards three points for a guard pass when the athlete on top "manages to surmount the legs of the opponent in bottom position" and maintains side control or north-south for three seconds. Note 1 to the same article defines the thing being passed as "the use of one or more legs to block the opponent from reaching side-control or north-south position".

The ADCC's published rules are shorter. "Passing the guard = 3 points", and the judges look for control, with "at least 75% of the opponent's back" on the mat. A further line deals with a pass that skips a step: "When passing the guard straight to mount or knee on the stomach, points will only be awarded for passing the guard."

Both documents describe an end state and a hold. The legs are behind the passer and the top position is kept, and how the passer got there is left open. Surmount is the nearest either text comes to a direction, and article 4.2 applies it to every pass. A sort by route is therefore an instructor's tool with no official list behind it. That is our reading of the two texts. Neither says so in terms.

Kesting's written descriptions supply an example for each word. For around there is the toreando, which he also calls the matador pass. In the oldest version he describes, the passer controls both ankles from a distance, fakes one way, throws the legs the other and will "use a zig-zag stepping pattern to pass the guard". In his article on countering it, a passer who has pinned the legs may "hop around to side control using quick left-right motions". The legs stay roughly where they were put, and the passer's feet carry the hips past them.

For under, Kang and Kesting name the double underhook pass, "where you place both your arms under your opponent's legs", and they call passes of this kind "slow and methodical, relying on tight grips and a crushing energy". A later Kesting article files the same pass among "the low passes" and gives the bottom player's side of it: the hips hoisted up and the body bent in half.

Over is the word the sources illustrate least directly. A companion page to the 2005 article shows Kang's knee slide, in which the passer "cross-drops his right knee across his opponent's right thigh". Filing that pass under over is our inference. The page does not say which of the three it is.

The over-under pass shows how the words can slide. Kesting describes it as coming "over one of his legs and under his other leg with your arms". Two of the three routes are in the name, and there they describe where the passer's arms go. Which way the hips finally travel is a separate matter.

A fourth word turns up in the same body of writing without being counted. Introducing a video on defending the knee cut, Kesting warns that at some point someone will try to "knife through your legs" with it. Our own Library entry on the knee cut uses the same picture: "instead of going around the legs, you cut through the space between them".

The word appears from the bottom player's side as well. Kesting printed a reader's letter passing on three open guard rules credited to the instructor David Ruiz. The third is to keep the knees flared out: "This makes passing around the guard much more difficult and leaves the best option for the opponent to pass through the center where your arms and grips can come into play more effectively." That sentence sorts passes into two, around and through the centre. It reaches print as a student's account of his instructor's rule, and we cite it as that.

So the lists do not line up. One count has three routes and no through. One rule has two routes and no over or under. Nothing we read says whether a knee cut is a fourth route or a kind of over, with the knee crossing one thigh while the body lands between the legs. The headline keeps the count of three because it is the only one stated as a count. We treat through as a fourth word in real use whose place nobody has fixed.

Route is one axis among several, and the same author uses others. In 2019 Kesting wrote: "Fundamentally there are two styles of guard passing: speed based and pressure based." Elsewhere he divides passes into standing and kneeling. The Grapplearts article on the leg drag sorts by range, setting that pass at the far end of the guard against closer passes such as the double under, the knee cut and the over-under.

The Technique Library's entry on pressure and loose passing works on the first of those axes and makes three families of it: pressure, movement and the leg drag. That entry is the reference for how tight a pass is, and this piece does not repeat it. A route and a family are separate descriptions. The knee cut is a pressure pass in the Library and a pass through the legs in Kesting's phrase, and both are true of it at once.

The leg drag strains the idea of a route more than any other pass here. The Grapplearts article calls it "a form of redirection pass", in which the passer works to "redirect their legs past your hips". The Library says the drag turns both of the bottom player's knees away. In the other examples the passer travels and the legs stay. Here the legs are moved and the passer barely has to travel. We would file it as around, with the travelling done by the other person's legs, and that filing is ours.

Here is the argument, and it is ours. The legs in front of a passer are more than one obstacle. The leg drag article speaks of the "layers of their guard" and puts the feet at the furthest range, ahead of the shins and knees. BJJ Mental Models has an entry called Layers of Guard, which puts the legs first and the arms behind them, and its entry on the knee line says: "To pass, you must clear the knee line." The Library's retention entry draws the same line across the bottom player's knees and says that "past the knee line is what passed means".

Feet first, then knees, then arms. Each route is a decision about how to get the hips past the first two. Going around leaves the feet and knees intact and tries to outrun them, so what it has to beat is the turn of the bottom player's hips. The Library puts the failure in one clause, "going around watches the hips turn and the knees follow", and Kesting says of butterfly hooks that the bottom player can keep them against the inside of your legs and "track you".

Going over has to put a knee or a shin down and keep it there. The Library again: "Going over meets a shin". Going under lifts the legs instead of flattening them, which puts the feet and knees above the passer and asks for the grips and patience Kang and Kesting describe. Going through splits the knees and arrives between them. That is where the Ruiz rule says the bottom player's arms and grips come into play, and where the Library's knee cut entry says the underhook decides whether the exchange ends as a pass or a sweep.

Read from underneath, the same list is a retention checklist. A knee facing the passer's chest is, in the Library's words, "a wall they have to go around", and the second rung of its retention ladder begins when the passer is "beside your knees and moving around them". Flared knees, on the Ruiz rule, make the outside harder and leave the middle. The Journal's piece on retention as a system names angle as one of its three variables, and an around pass is an attack on that variable. Kesting's version is short: "Guard passing and guard retention are two sides of the same coin."

This is a way of sorting. We found no count of which route succeeds more often, and none is claimed here. The three-way list comes from one article by two authors, and the fourth word from a phrase and a relayed rule.

The route is the last decision, with others in front of it. A closed guard has to be opened before any of the three is available. That is the first of Kang and Kesting's stages and the subject of our piece on the locked ankles. In half guard one of the passer's legs is already trapped, and the note on the underhook covers what decides that exchange.

For a beginner the use is small and practical. When a pass is shown, ask which way it goes past the legs and what was in the way on that side: feet, a knee, a shin, a pair of arms. When your own guard is passed, ask the same question about the pass that did it. A coach who watches you roll will answer both faster than a list of words can. The words are for the rounds in between.