Getting the hips back underneath

Position and problem

The pass is in progress. Their chest is closing on yours, your knees are being pushed to one side, and the instinct is to reach with the legs — to throw a foot back in front of them, to lasso a leg, to grab anything. Sometimes it works. More often the leg gets pinned where it was thrown, because a leg reaching from underneath a passed hip has no structure behind it. The hips are behind the opponent's line of travel, and until that changes, every leg you place is a leg they can walk past.

Objective

Restore the relationship where your hips are underneath and facing the opponent, so that your legs have something to work from.

Core concept

Retention is a hip problem that presents as a leg problem. Your legs can only make a guard if your hips are aimed at the opponent and underneath their weight — otherwise the legs are just limbs in front of a person who is already past them. Everything in the retention toolbox is a way of moving the hips: shrimping moves them backward and away, bridging moves them upward, and rotating on the shoulders moves them around. The choice between those is mostly a question of which direction is still open. It is also worth being clear that retention is a ladder of decreasing options, not a single skill. High on the ladder you can frame and re-face them with small movements. Low on the ladder your hips are already behind their shoulder line, and the honest answers are a scramble, a turn to your knees, or accepting the position and starting an escape.

Key mechanics

1. 01Face them with your hips first, legs second. If the belt line is aimed at the passer, almost any leg placement works; if it is not, almost none of them do.
2. 02Frame at the hip or shoulder to buy the space, then move — a frame is a payment for a hip movement, not a place to live. Frames held without movement are eventually just walls that get flattened.
3. 03Shrimp away from their pressure and immediately re-insert a knee into the gap you made. The shrimp without the knee insertion gives the space straight back.
4. 04Keep the knees between you and them for as long as it is possible. A knee is the shortest leg frame you have and the hardest to walk around.
5. 05Use the shoulders as the pivot. Rotating on the upper back to keep the hips mobile is what keeps the legs live; a shoulder stapled flat to the mat turns your hips into a hinge that only opens one way.
6. 06Know which rung you are on. Once their chest is past your knee line and your hips are behind their shoulder, stop retaining and start the escape — the two use different mechanics and mixing them wastes the window for both.

Common errors

• ×Throwing legs at the passer while the hips stay put, which places limbs the opponent can pin rather than a guard they have to solve.
• ×Framing hard and staying still, so the frame is eventually collapsed by weight it was never meant to hold alone.
• ×Shrimping backward without re-inserting a knee, which returns the space that was just bought.
• ×Letting both shoulders settle flat on the mat early, which removes the rotation that keeps the hips available.
• ×Continuing to fight for guard long after the position has become a side-control escape, so neither the retention nor the escape gets a full effort.

Safety

Retention at the bottom of the ladder often turns into inversion, and inverting under a partner's weight puts load through the neck. The specific risk is rolling onto the crown of the head with a heavier person driving forward, which loads the cervical spine in flexion. Build inversion range separately and slowly, keep the weight on the upper back and the point of the shoulder rather than the top of the head, and pick a non-inverted recovery when someone is already heavy on you or when your neck is sore from a previous session. There is no version of this where a stiff neck is a reason to invert more carefully rather than not at all.

Training progression

1. 01Static: lie on your back, partner kneeling to your side with no pressure. Move only your hips until your belt line faces them, then place one knee in. Repeat on the other side.
2. 02Cooperative: partner walks slowly from side to side around your legs. You re-face and re-insert a knee each time, with no attacks and no grips.
3. 03Constrained game: partner passes at 50 percent and may only use one passing technique. You may only frame, shrimp and re-insert.
4. 04Ladder drill: partner starts the round already halfway past. Practise identifying out loud whether this is a retention or an escape situation before you move.
5. 05Positional sparring: full-resistance passing, bottom player restarts when the top player establishes chest-to-chest control past the legs.
6. 06Live rounds with one instruction: when you get passed, remember which direction your hips were pointing at the moment it happened.

Related entries

• Frames versus blocks
• Connection in open guard
• The knee shield