Taking the back from turtle

Turtle is what somebody does when they have decided that being on all fours is better than being on their back. Knees under hips, elbows in, head up or tucked. It is a defensive shape rather than a system, and it has no legs in front of anybody, which is the property that separates it from every guard.

That matters for how it is treated. A guard is a position that can attack. Turtle mostly cannot, which is why the rule books handle it as a state to be resolved rather than a position to be scored. The IBJJF awards takedown points against somebody who ends up on all fours only when the athlete who put them there controls the back, without any requirement for hooks, and keeps at least one of their knees on the ground for three seconds. The IJF's rules describe a kneeling athlete who may not grab the legs to defend a throw, and specify that once that athlete has two elbows and two knees on the floor, the standing player may apply a technique only to transition into ground work.

Both documents are doing the same thing from different directions: they are treating turtle as a temporary condition and setting a clock on it. The person on top is expected to convert. The person underneath is expected to move.

What follows is about that conversion. It is a transition rather than a submission, and it is worth its own treatment because the sequence people use to take a back is usually taught backwards.

The most useful evidence about back control is not a coaching argument. It is that three organisations wrote definitions of it independently, and the definitions share a structure.

United World Wrestling's grappling rules award four points for back mount when a grappler controls the opponent from the back with their chest to the opponent's back and their heels between both of the opponent's thighs, or in a body triangle, with the legs positioned to trap up to one of the opponent's arms, held for three seconds. The IBJJF awards four points when an athlete takes control of the opponent's back placing their heels between the thighs without crossing their legs, in a position to trap up to one of the opponent's arms, without trapping the arm above the shoulder line, and remains there for three seconds. The ADCC rules give three points for back mount with hooks, accept both hooks or a body triangle, and specify that the hooks must not be over either shoulder.

Three tables and three point values. All three describe the legs, and all three cap how much of the opponent may be trapped. Only United World Wrestling states a chest requirement in the clause itself; the IBJJF and ADCC definitions describe the legs alone. Where they differ is instructive: UWW and ADCC accept a body triangle for full points; the IBJJF gives only an advantage for it, and the same reduced score applies when the legs are crossed, when only one heel is in, or when both of the opponent's arms are trapped.

The chest connection is a coaching commonplace rather than a rule most of these documents state, and it is worth being precise about that: only one of the three requires it. What all three do require is that the legs are in, and that is what the scoring turns on.

The usual teaching order is hooks, then harness, then attack. The order that survives contact is the reverse.

The reason is geometric. Somebody escapes the back by rotating their shoulders toward you and getting their back to the mat. That rotation is fought at the shoulder line. If your chest is fixed to their upper back with the over-shoulder arm deep and the under-arm elbow tight to your own ribs, they can move their hips a considerable distance without changing which way they are facing. Two hooks with a loose chest, by contrast, is a position somebody can turn inside all day, and it is where most people lose backs while believing they still have one.

From turtle specifically, this changes what you reach for. The first thing to establish is not a leg. It is the connection: chest onto the upper back, one arm over the shoulder and one under the far armpit, hands joined. If you can get that, the legs are a matter of time. If you cannot, putting a foot inside a thigh gives you something to be rolled over with rather than something to hold on with.

There is a common intermediate that the rules acknowledge. Controlling a turtled opponent's back with no hooks at all is a real position, and both the IBJJF's takedown clause and United World Wrestling's phrase about partial back control treat it as one. It is not a failed back take. It is the state that precedes a back take, and it scores or restarts in your favour under both of those documents.

The harness is usually described as symmetric, and it is not. One arm goes over a shoulder, one under the far armpit, and which is which determines what happens when the position moves.

The rule to carry is that you follow them to the mat on the side of your under-arm shoulder. Turn toward the over-shoulder side and you end up underneath them with the position half gone. Turn to the under-arm side and you end up on top of their back. Choosing the harness is therefore choosing which direction of escape you are prepared to travel with, before they have started travelling.

From turtle this decision usually gets made for you by where the opening was. If their far arm came up, you have the near side. If they gave you a hip, you have the other. The mistake is to take whichever arm is closest and then discover, mid-roll, that you committed to the side you cannot follow to.

One thing not to do, in any of these positions: do not cross your ankles in front of the opponent's body. Under the IBJJF's table it drops a four-point position to an advantage, and it is a weaker structure that offers an attack to a defender who is not even escaping.

Hooks are directional rather than symmetric. The bottom hook stops somebody sitting down toward the mat; the top hook stops them turning into you. Knowing which of yours is under attack tells you which escape is arriving, which is a more useful piece of information than the fact that you have two of them.

The choice between two hooks and a body triangle is genuinely unsettled, and the rule books make the trade-off legible. The triangle is harder to strip and restricts the opponent more, but it commits both of your legs to one side and can be turned into. Two hooks are more mobile and give up less if the opponent stands. And under the IBJJF, the triangle is worth an advantage where two hooks are worth four points, which is a reason to have both available rather than a reason to pick one.

The general principle for anybody losing backs is easier to state than to do. Recover the harness before you recover the legs. Losing both hooks with the chest connection intact is a recoverable position. Losing the chest connection with both hooks in is usually the start of an escape that has already worked.

This transition has real risk in it, and unlike a submission the risk is not concentrated in one joint. It is spread across a moment when two bodies are rotating and neither person has full control of the other's head.

The rule books have written down the specific dangers, which is the most direct evidence available for what they are. The ADCC rules prohibit spiking an opponent's head when the opponent is on your back, and prohibit the person on the bottom from rolling forward with somebody attached. The IJF makes it a direct disqualification to intentionally fall backwards when the other athlete is clinging to your back and either athlete has control of the other's movement, and separately makes it a disqualification to take any action that may endanger or injure an opponent, singling out the neck and the spinal vertebrae. Three separate clauses, in two documents, all about the same twenty seconds of a fight.

In a training room that becomes a short list. Do not roll forward or backwards to escape when somebody is attached to your back, because their head and neck are not where you can see them. Do not drive a defender's head into the mat to stop a turn. If you are riding a back and the position starts to invert or roll, the correct response is to let it happen slowly rather than to hold harder through the rotation.

The other item belongs to the person on top, and it is the body triangle. Locked around the midsection and squeezed hard, it stops being a control and becomes something people tap to. That tap deserves the same immediate, complete release as any other, and a body triangle should not be squeezed to make a stalled position feel productive. All of this belongs in a supervised room, with a partner who agreed to the terms of the round, and with both people tapping early rather than proving a point.

Rule books are good evidence for what a position is and poor evidence for how often anything works. Nobody has published a measurement of how often a turtle becomes a back take, how often a back take produces a finish, or whether the chest-first ordering argued for here outperforms the alternative.

The closest relevant work is small. Spanias, Kirk and Ovretveit, coding 26 no-gi submission-only matches, found that time spent in dominant positions, a category that included back control, correlated with winning by an upper-body submission and did not correlate with winning by a lower-body one. In their sample the most frequent finish overall was the heel hook, and the athletes who won that way had spent no time in dominant positions at all. Under a ruleset with no points, position and finish came apart.

That is worth holding onto as a caution against the version of this article that could have been written instead: the confident one, in which taking the back is the point of grappling and everything else is a route to it. Under the scoring tables quoted here it is the highest-value position on the mat. Under a submission-only format with no points, the sample we have suggests it is one route among several.

What survives both readings is narrower and better supported. Back control is defined, by three organisations that did not consult each other, as a chest connection with legs attached. The transition from turtle is the business of getting the first part before the second. Everything the position later does, including the strangle it is famous for, depends on that ordering rather than on the legs everybody reaches for first.