Back Control
Attacking and maintaining the position behind the opponent, and the mechanics that keep you there.
Back retention: following the turn
Maintaining back control means moving with the shoulder turn you cannot stop, so that the hand fighting, the hips and the hooks arrive where the escape is going.
Intermediate · No-gi firstRear naked strangle: the seat belt finished
The rear naked choke, or RNC, is a strangle: the seat belt closed around the neck, finished by a shut structure rather than by squeezing harder.
Foundational · Gi and no-giSeat belt and hooks
Back control is held by the chest connection first and the legs second, and understanding that ordering explains most of what goes wrong when the back is lost.
Foundational · No-gi first
Reading connected to this area
Journal
- Submission-only, and the overtime problem
Removing points was meant to remove stalling. We read the rules that submission-only promotions actually publish, and found the best-known overtime written down by a wrestling federation and two regional promotions, but not, that we could find, by the event it is named after.
- Taking the back from turtle
Three scoring tables define back control in three different ways, and what they disagree about tells you more than what they share.
- The rear naked strangle from back control
A strangle and a neck crank are separated by a small change in what the second hand is doing, which is why four rule books bothered to write the difference down.
Influential Figures
- Marcelo Garcia
He won at the top of no-gi grappling with a deliberately small set of positions, and then taught that set in public, which changed what a competitive game is expected to look like.
- Roger Gracie
He won at the highest level of the gi ruleset with the mount and the cross choke, the two things every beginner is taught in the first month, and made the case that the basics were never the problem.