Why getting behind someone is still the best way to win.

It’s a weird time to be a grappler. As MMA has grown and developed, grappling has been steadily pushed aside in the scoring system. I just can’t wrap my mind around it.

Grappling effectively won the kumite that was the first UFC. That experiment showed it doesn’t matter how effectively you can hit if you’re stuck on your butt. If your opponent knows submissions neither of you will be there for long.

You’d think that that would have cemented grappling as the defacto skillset every mixed martial artist should possess. Moreover you would assume that the skillset that most strongly correlates with dominating a fight would carry weight in the judges’ eyes. If I can hold you down while you work to defend but stay grounded you’re still on defense and defense doesn’t score. The UFC rules and judges don’t see it that way as they have progressively rewarded effective grappling less and less. I guess correlation doesn’t equal causation, or whatever.

I don’t want to come off like some delusional grappler. I understand that professional fights are predicated on controlling, impacting, and hurting opponents until they can no longer continue, or the officials say they can’t. Striking is inherent to our understanding of unarmed combat, and, from a pure entertainment stand-point, striking is dynamic and exciting. When Rory MacDonald gets punched, falls to the floor, and starts writhing in confusion trying to stand-up and face Robbie Lawler the crowd screams in approval and acknowledgment that he is finished. Grappling is comparatively slower and harder to understand than striking arts.

When Rafa Mendes dances in, out, and around someone’s guard, peoples heads’ tilt. You’re more likely to hear “What’s he doing?” than “That’s incredible!” Unless you’ve felt the weight of a human body focused through a single shoulder that is being used to cement you to the floor it’s just hard to know and appreciate how exhausting, controlling, and impactful that is.

Today we’re talking about a specific position that should be undeniably valuable, back mount, why it’s so valuable, and the primary threats of the position. We’re going back to basics and going deep on back mount. Before we go deep on back mount, let’s back up and go really broad on why this position matters so much.

All martial arts and combat sports are about two things, control and damage. It’s a fighter’s job to control and damage their opponent until the opponent quits or the ref stops the action. In the process, the fighter should avoid their opponent’s attempts at controlling and damaging them. When a fighter gets behind their opponent, they are inherently safe from their opponent’s immediate attempts at damaging them, and they have many opportunities that allow them to disproportionately damage their opponent with strikes and submission holds. No other position in combat sports affords these privileges of damage and safety, and we need to recognize that that is inherently valuable.

Let’s start by defining the subpositions of back mount, naming the threats, highlighting who are great examples to study from the position, and where the positions differ in pure grappling competition versus mixed martial arts.

Back mount is one position with a lot of variations on how you play it. With all of those variations there are three themes of control that always apply, with each relating to the body part its directing.

Now that we understand those principles, we need to keep one thing in mind at all times - the rear naked choke is the primary goal.

The rear naked choke is the most directly effective submission in all of grappling. With a good rear naked choke you can end the match in seconds without even fully securing the hooks for a real back mount. A properly set rear naked choke puts the lock, anchor, and angle of the submission at a difficult to reach position, making it more than challenging to escape. As such, the rear naked choke should always be the goal when you get behind someone, and effectively threatening the rear naked choke opens up other submission opportunities.

When you’re on someone’s back, the only reason you’d have both of your arms under their arm pits is when you want to ride them, tire them out, and fully lock in the submission. When you’re ready to attack, one arm needs to go over the shoulder to being threatening the rear naked choke. When your hands are locked with one arm over and one arm under the position is called a seat belt. When you’re laying on the side of the arm over the shoulder you are on what it is known as the strong, or pillow side.

The pillow side has the strength of being secure with the choke quickly accessible. Your opponent’s neck is laying on top of your choking arm and that makes it immediately accessible. With proper head position, it can be difficult for your opponent to turn in any direction to escape back mount.

When you’re on the pillow side, your opponent will often move your choking arm over their head. This allows them to escape but it briefly opens them for a front arm triangle as shown below.

When fighters are trying to escape they’ll often separate their hands from their torso so they can build a base. This can give their opponents interesting avenues to stay connected and retake their back. This also opens up the possibility for one of the rarest submissions in grappling and MMA, the Twister.

While attacking from pillow side affords you immediacy and directness you lose optionality. On the pillow side, you are limited in your follow-up submissions. You and your opponent are laying on top of your leg which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to transition to triangle chokes or arm locks. That leads us directly into the next section which is my favorite style of attacking the back.

The straight jacket is the opposite yet equal of the pillow side. Instead of falling on the over hook you fall on the under hook, and where the pillow side affords immediacy and directness, the straight jacket provides optionality. With the straight jacket you are free to harass the face, easily trap arms, and do several follow-up submissions.

I wrote another short piece specifically on the straight jacket and you can read it here.

To attack the back effectively on both sides your head needs to be higher than your opponent’s. As your head gets higher relative to your opponent’s, the position gets less and less secure, but you also get additional freedom for attacking secondary submissions like the rear triangle, or shoulder and arm locks from the straight jacket.

Once you’re riding high on someone’s back and throw your leg over their shoulder, your opponent will generally try to scoot out of the position, push your legs open, or some combination of the two. This is not inherently wrong, in fact it’s the primary open avenue for escape, but doing this with incorrect timing will run you straight into rear triangles and arm locks.

This position is particularly sinister because the angle you pull the arm can either damage the shoulder like an Americana, or the elbow like an arm bar. If your opponent decides to wait it out they are stuck in a triangle choke and are at risk of being strangled. You’re truly fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t.

Facedown back mount is arguably one of the worst places to be, especially in MMA. When you’ve taken an opponent face down they not only have to carry your weight, but your hands are free to hit them and open up chokes. It’s terrible and it’s produced one of the most viral highlights in all of MMA.

If you manage to maintain strong hooks you can also drive your hips into your opponent, gluing them to the floor. Even worse, if you lock up a triangle around your opponent’s waist on their back you can hold the position longer and potentially damage their spine.

The body triangle is sometimes called a stalling position but I’ve never fully agreed with that argument. Not only does the body triangle allow you to potentially damage your opponent’s spine, as seen above, but it forces your opponent to use a disproportionate amount of energy to escape. That would equate to impact, as spelled out in the scoring criteria. Besides, if any technique in a fight is literally so controlling a fighter can rest, the position, or the act of getting there, should be rewarded on the scorecards.

Body triangle or not, the problem with being face down and trying to escape from there, is you are forced to extend your limbs to move. Even when you are moving to stay safe you are giving your opponent opportunities to attack fight ending submissions like arm locks and the rare but devastating Suloev Stretch. Let’s look at both.

Marcelo Garcia made a name for himself as a human backpack. The lightning fast 77kg competitor would constantly pull on his opponents to pressure them, create angles, and move towards the back. Garcia has probably the most famous rear naked choke ever, where he demonstrated the importance of constantly attacking the head and neck and biasing upper body control.

Gordon Ryan is the most dominant no gi competitor ever. Over the years, Ryan has shown an incredible ability to get to his opponents’ back, lock down limbs, and attack the neck. He largely popularized the straight jacket system touched on above.

I debated which MMA fighter to put here for awhile. There are some obvious choices like BJ Penn and Demian Maia. There are some less obvious choices that are still great to study like Gunnar Nelson and Michael Chiesa. All of them have incredible rear naked chokes, but the reason I chose Aljamain Sterling is twofold. Aljamain has an incredible variety of back attacks and his ability to find and ride the back from standing or on the ground is remarkable.

Sterling does what my old wrestling coach refers to as biting the ear. That means when Sterling gets a head outside single he immediately postures like he’s trying to bite his opponent’s far ear. This ameliorates the threat of the guillotine choke while giving Sterling a clear avenue to move up his opponent’s spine to secure back mount. This makes Sterling a constant threat to your neck.

Earlier in Sterling’s career, he demonstrated a unique ability to squeeze from comparatively worse positions as well.

Sterling also owns one of the only Suloev stretches finishes in the UFC.

The totality of these gifs across BJJ and MMA show us one thing. When you’re on someone’s back, you can literally end the fight by attacking every major segment of their body. You can damage legs, spines, arms, and necks; choke people unconscious; or, hit them until they give you the ability to do one of the former finishes. More importantly there are virtually zero reliable ways to hurt a competent opponent when they have your back. And, no, that ankle lock is not reliable.

I struggle to think of any other position in combat sports that affords the privileges of being able to hurt your opponent and finish the fight without being subject to the same potential for damage.

Good defense is a good offense especially when discussing escaping the back. I’m not saying just focus on attacking, what I am saying is when someone is on your back you need to be active. The longer you wait, the more opportunity you give your opponent to finish you. Considering how perilous and potentially dangerous the position is, when escaping the back you need to walk a razor’s edge that sits between deliberate movement and overactivity. With that in mind here are two tactics that yield safety when escaping the back.

Whether you’re on the pillow side or the under hook side the goal remains the same. You need to monitor your opponent’s hands to prevent the choke while moving your head, neck, and back flat to the mat. Below are two sequences of back escapes, one shows escaping the pillow side and the other shows escaping the under hook side.

A high head can actually prevent back attacks from coming into play before the tight hands. If you can bridge into your opponent and move your head over their’s like Giles is demonstrating above it becomes extremely difficult to finish you with a choke.

MMA’s generalized combat lags behind specific martial arts competitions. Techniques are validated as viable in individual combat sports like kickboxing and no gi grappling before they’re brought to MMA for final combat stress testing. Just look at the buggy choke, Kade Ruotolo finished PJ Barch with one to win Combat Jiujitsu Worlds, Jacob Rodriguez used it to win the ADCC West Coast trials, and now we see people trying to use it on regional MMA cards as well as the UFC. So, what do we see in professional grappling that hasn’t made it’s way to MMA yet?

I’d love to be able to end this article teaching you about a singular technique, one gamebreaking submission that will completely rip back mount wide open and change the sport. At least for now, that technique hasn’t made its way into my purview exist. What is present in professional grappling and not in MMA is systematic hand fighting and limb trapping.

The goal of hand fighting is to gain a positional advantage. You’re trying to prevent your opponent from making a grip they can score with while making grips you can score with. The Straight Jacket we reviewed above is an extremely overpowered clear example of hand fighting and limb trapping. I take your back, make grips that allow me to score a positional advantage (the hand trap), and, when I achieve that positional advantage, I choke you. That’s not the only way to hand fight from that position or the back.

In my opinion, the greatest area for improving back mount would come from systematizing striking into hand fighting and trapping so that hitting from back mount leads right into the straight jacket position. Look at the gifs below from two separate BJ Penn fights. It’s not a crazy reach to say fighters can combine cross wrist grips, heel strikes, and hand traps to go directly into the straight jacket from the back.

Combining hand fighting, hand trapping, and striking doesn’t even have to be this fancy and dynamic. Someone could simply punch from behind and go straight into cross grips to set up the beginning of the straight jacket. I think we already have a high profile fighter that could make this happen.

There’s a reason I spent a good portion of this article discussing Aljamain Sterling. Sterling already combines multiple submission threats with strikes from the back to beat up his opponent. More importantly, when he gets to the back he is damn hard to shake off. Just look at his second fight with Petr Yan. If the second round hadn’t ended Sterling would probably still be back there.

Sterling regularly uses body triangles and will often fall to the under hook side, essentially putting him in the perfect position for straight jacket. Sterling also trains with Matt Serra, a Renzo Gracie OG and training partner of John Danaher, the current coach of Gordon Ryan and Giancarlo Bodoni, both referenced above. Danaher is not the first coach to show trapping hands on the back, but, he is the first person I heard use the term “straight jacket”, and his DVD on the subject is a masterclass on how to attack the back.

To be direct, Sterling is the perfect fighter to advance the back to the elite systems we see in no gi grappling competition today. Before that Sterling has his work cut out for him.

I’m writing this as Sterling is preparing to fight the former bantamweight champion of the world, a man that never lost their title in the Octagon, the King of Cringe; Henry Cejudo. Come fight time, Cejudo will be coming back from nearly a 3 year layoff, he’s 36, and Sterling will have a major size advantage. Generally this would mean the champ has a major grappling grappling advantage. Unfortunately for Sterling, the Cejudo is also the second youngest American wrestler to ever win gold at the Olympics, so I’m not necessarily confident that Sterling has a grappling advantage over him. More importantly, the way both of them wrestle presents some unique challenges for Sterling.

Generally Sterling’s takedowns come from him picking up a leg and running his opponent around until he can climb their spine, or they turn for him to take their back. He doesn’t tend to shoot low, and he doesn’t really trip or throw his opponents from upper body clinches. Let’s look at three examples from recent fights

I’m not really sure how well this style of grappling will work against Cejudo.

I’m not sure how much the layoff will effect Cejudo, but I have to think it will be major factor against a bigger, active champion like Sterling over the course of five rounds. Tune in Saturday, May 6th to see if Sterling can keep his title as the human backpack as he takes on Cejudo at UFC 288.