Statistics and Armbars

I can't remember whether it was my daughter, Ronda, or my niece, Samantha, who first told me about the sherdog site. What they have in common is that they are both in their twenties and find stuff cool and interesting that too me is as exciting as watching your cat eat a bug. That is, a little gross but interesting the first time, which for me, was about 45 years ago.

So .... I was very pleasantly surprised when in searching I came across what is now my most favoritest forum thread on the internet, I refer, my friends to the Sherdog UFC Factoid (Useless Info Thread).

They documented what I had suspected for a while

which is that not too many people lose by arm bar in mixed martial arts.  It is clear from these data that the percentage of wins by submission are going down - it's the purple line (the top one for those of you who are color-blind or visually impaired [Hi, Tina!] ) - the one that hits a peak over 70% in the 1990s and is around 20% now.

There is also some data, albeit less, on the Sherdog site that suggests arm bars are declining as a percentage of submissions.

Why would that be so? Well, I think in both a rear naked choke (referred to in judo as hadaka time - Japanese for "naked choke") and arm bars, a person who is unfamiliar with the technique can lose even when the execution is pretty sloppy. If they have no idea what the hell you are planning to do with that arm or behind their back, they won't start defending until it is too late.

So ... early on, you see lots of people losing by submissions. Then, two things happened.  One, a fairly large number of people realized that if a person is jumping on your back, they are probably going for a choke and you should get them off of there and if they are grabbing your arm, they are probably going to arm bar you so you should get it back. Two, more people actually started doing submissions, which made them even harder to catch because once you do a technique yourself you are better at sensing when someone is setting you up.

Most people became harder to submit and a few people became a lot harder to submit.

Wouldn't more people doing submissions mean more people would be submitted? Not necessarily. What I suspect (and the data bear me out) is that the general population of fighters has gotten better at defending half-ass arm bars, so more people doing half-ass arm bars is not going to increase the number of submissions.

Every time I go to a mixed martial arts event I see a lot of fighters whose matwork just sucks. I know high school English teachers always say that there is never a time when there isn't a more appropriate way to write a description of something. They are wrong. The matwork of most fighters in the UFC just sucks.

Does this mean that judo players are all of a sudden going to go into the UFC and wipe up the mat with all the mixed martial artists? You can read my post on that here. Short answer: I don't fucking think so.


As Rick Hawn said, more nicely than me, there is a difference between doing judo and getting punched in the face.

What is the solution? Practice. Practice. Practice. Learn some arm bars that don't suck.

Totally shameless plug, you can start with our book.

Practice Escapes from Armbars

This seems like a no-brainer, right? Honestly, though, how often do you practice escapes from arm bars? Daily? Weekly?

How often do you practice escapes from pins? From chokes?

Watch this short video. There will be pop quiz at the end of it.




The most interesting thing I hope you notice here is that she is doing the arm bar on his left arm. At the beginning of the clip, I say,

"Now we're going to practice on the OTHER side!"

Just to show you that I practice what I preach, having written a post earlier about being sure you practice arm bars on both sides.

Also notice that while the player on top is practicing the arm bar, the player on the bottom is practicing arm bar escapes.

It just so happens that the day we did this drill we had a fairly mixed group - some big, strong guys, a couple of teenage girls and some kids under 12. How to make sure that everyone gets a productive work out? On that particular day, those big guys, like the one on the ground above, only practiced escapes. It was good for them because they got into a dangerous position and then got out.

The smaller, younger people practiced arm bars. They got most of the way into the position and then had to try to finish it.

Everyone had to work hard and everyone got better.

SHAMELESS PLUG

Learn more matwork from our book, Winning on the Ground, available as an ebook and in paper book.

Drilling Armbars: Right vs Left

Since I am busy working on the new computer game my company just released for beta testing last week, and checking over 1,000 emails (yes, literally) that came in during the week I was gone, I called Jim Pedro, Sr. and asked if he had any suggestions for a couple of blog posts. Well, actually, I just asked him for a couple of blog posts and wrote down what he said.

"Once a month or so, Jimmy (1999 World Judo Champion, Jimmy Pedro, Jr.) gives a clinic for an hour at the club. Usually I'm not on the mat, but this time I walked out there for some reason and a little girl pipes up and asks me to help her. I think it was sankaku (a triangle choke) they were learning. Anyway, my first reaction was to think she was doing it wrong because it looked different from all of the other kids but then I caught myself and realized, wait a minute, she was just doing it to the opposite side. That's when I got to thinking about the fact that we almost always do matwork on the opponent's strong side. 

Look out on the mat and you'll see that 90% of the time, the person is arm barring their opponent's right arm. That doesn't really make sense does it? From now on, what I'm going to start having people do is to go for the weaker arm. 

I kind of sort of agree with Jim. If you are going to only train one side, it probably makes more sense to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing because your opponent won't expect it. It also makes more sense to attack the weaker arm. It is also true, as I looked through just random pictures I had of me doing juji gatame that it was always the person's right arm.

Okay, I admit, these were just the first two pictures I pulled up, but they ARE both being armbarred on the right arm.

So, Jim is right but there are two reasons I don't COMPLETELY agree. The first is that I usually end up in whatever position I'm in as a transition or combination from something else my opponent did or I did. Since I am right-handed and I mostly  throw right-handed, when you hit the mat, odds are, I have hold of your right arm. 

Jim is also partly correct, though. In the first photo above, I had Crystal in tate shiho gatame (a mount) and she tried to push me away with her right arm, which I had shoved across her face. That naturally led to me arm barring her right arm. In the second photo, I was doing the collect the arm move, then rolled on top into the mount again and then moved into the arm bar. In this case, though, since Ronda is left-handed, I was actually arm barring her weaker arm. Jim would argue, though, that I could just as easily have set her up in this case to arm bar her other arm, and he is correct, because when you are collecting the arm, you could do it to either side.

The one place I would disagree is that I think you should always practice BOTH sides. Ronda competed in swimming from age six until ten, then she started judo.  From the time Ronda was little, I told her,

 "There are no sides in matwork. You're not standing up. It's like in swimming, no one does a left-sided backstroke. "

That probably doesn't make sense but my point was to convince her that she should be able to do matwork equally well to both sides and to practice it equally often on both sides. It's funny because I agree with Jim when he says you should pick a side and stick with it, when it comes to standing techniques. Not that you shouldn't have one or two techniques to the opposite side, but that you should have one that is predominant. For matwork, though, it just seems different, somehow.

I have to say, when I was young and could actually do all this stuff really well, when I was on the mat and everything was going right, it almost seemed like swimming in air. Let me know if that makes sense to you because it makes lots of sense to me in my brain!

Are judo players really that wimpy?

The answer to that question, in my opinion, is "No", but the rules sure make it seem that way.

I am off now to teach judo to sixth, seventh and eighth-graders. For many, this will be their second judo class. For others, they may have had a whole 20-30 classes. Not even credible yellow belt level, most of them.

Today, I'm teaching defending from the bottom, including a cross choke and an arm bar.

In judo, no one is allowed to do arm bars until brown belt, in some tournaments not until black belt. They aren't allowed to do arm bars until they are 17, in the U.S.

They aren't allowed to choke until 13.

Supposedly, the reason is that the US is such a litigious society (that means we like to sue people). For some reason, jiu jitsu, grappling and mixed martial arts in the same society manage to allow arm bars and chokes and no one gets sued, terribly injured or dies. This is the same society where kids play football for hours in hundred degree heat and occasionally one of them DOES die.

I have even taught as a guest instructor at clubs where they were perturbed that I taught their novice ADULTS to choke.

I just don't understand it. I really don't.

Why are judo players supposedly so much more delicate than people in other jiu jitsu, grappling and MMA?

The Most Important Things I Learned from Judo

and how destroying my knee made me a world champion

I'm not very good at throwing, as you can see by my less than perfect technique here.  At a very young age, I had what in a less stubborn person would have been a career-ending injury. My knee was so damaged that it became physically impossible to balance on my right leg and throw someone - eliminating a whole range of throws. Eventually, my other knee started to give out, from years of bearing 80% of my weight, and it became increasingly difficult for me to lift anyone even when standing on both legs. The only reasonable decision was to quit competing.

No one has ever accused me of being a reasonable person. Instead, I pursued international competition, rather successfully, if I do say so myself.

What I learned was to turn strengths into weaknesses. As you can see here, my throwing technique is not the best. I start in a standard grip.

I turn into a throw, just like anyone else.

Because my knees are very bad - better now, since I had one replaced, but prior to that I had one ligament and no cartilage in the right knee - none, not even the stuff that is supposed to cover the end of your bones - and was missing one ligament and some of my cartilage in the other knee - I can only bend a very little, as you can see.

The opponent just sort of ungracefully rolls off of me and lands on her side. Not very hard and not completely on her back.

However, I am in a perfect position for an arm bar. I have her arm at the elbow, her arm is straight up in the air. My right foot is close to her body to keep her from turning to the right. My left foot is near her head, also keeping her from turning to the right.

It takes less than a second for me to fall backwards, taking her arm with me. As I fall, my right leg goes over her body and both hands slide up to her wrist so that I have her arm locked against me with two hands. Then, I just arch to finish the arm bar.

What I learned was this -- to turn my weakness, that is, my inability to lift someone up so that I could throw them hard and flat on the back - into a strength, by practicing the transition from that rolling off my back position into a really tight arm bar. 

When I got injured, I thought it was the end of the world, that I would never be able to do judo again. Oddly, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I learned to focus on what I could do and not what I couldn't do. When I was injured things like ligament replacements and total knee replacements didn't exist. That meant I had to find a different way to win that didn't require being able to stand up very well.  I learned to look at what other people were not very good at as an opportunity - that was mat work in general and particularly the transition from standing to mat work and the transition between mat techniques. 

If I hadn't blown my knee out when I was a teenager, I'd probably have gone along like everyone else, trying to do a better shoulder throw and never have really won very much outside of the U.S. 

Three other really important lessons I learned at the same time were:

• that success often comes from doing what no one else is doing,
• hard work has an almost infinite capacity to make up for what you're missing in other areas, even missing body parts,
• it's perfectly fine to pursue goals that are completely unreasonable.

 For example,  I decided to write a game in javascript, just because. The fact that I didn't know javascript when I decided this did not deter me in the slightest. Today I got it to work. Tomorrow, I'll get it to work better. 

While I'm getting too old to pull off the arm bars 100% of the time, those lessons help me in business every single day.

Arm bars and Legos

Today,  a boy at the West Coast Judo Training Center told me he did not want to learn turnovers or pins, he wanted to learn arm bars. When I asked him why, he said,

Do you know who Ronda Rousey is? Did you know that she won four matches, all of them by arm bar? I want to be like that.

I told him, that why, yes, I did know who Ronda Rousey was, that, in fact, I'm her mother and I taught her arm bars. He was too polite to openly call me a liar, but he looked very skeptical.

If my judo teaching was a lego, it would be that base piece. You know, the blue or green piece that you stick all of the other legos on to. That piece isn't cool. No one asks for the base piece. They ask for a pirate kit or the safari legos or the Star Wars ones.

Funny thing, though, look at just about any cool lego thing and if you don't have that boring base piece, it falls over. You lay out the beginning of your cool thingy on the base and build from there.

I explained to the skeptical young man that often right before you see Ronda do an arm bar, the opponent is on her back and Ronda is on top of her.

I pointed out that judo matches (and mixed martial arts matches) do not start that way.  .

Everybody who just wants to practice "the cool stuff" is missing two important points:

1.  If you don't practice the boring basics (which I personally don't think are boring at all) you don't get a chance to get to the cool endings. I further pointed out to the boy who wanted to do nothing but arm bars that politely asking your opponent to lay down on the mat and let you get on top does not really work very well as a means of getting into this position. We spent the rest of the time doing the collect the arm turnover to get in position for an arm bar. We didn't do any arm bars at all today.
2. As Jim said the other day, "The idea is to win." The final point I told the skeptical arm-bar- assassin - wannabe is that you will find that the better you get at arm bars, the more people you pin. The reason is simple - they are too focused on tucking those arms in tight to be able to defend against pins successfully. After I'd dislocated a half-dozen arms, I pinned a LOT of people. 

I'd have more to say about this but I have to go find A Christmas Carol because I am the mother of an eighth-grader who needs to finish her homework. (I'm also Ronda Rousey's mother, whether that boy believes it or not.)

Matwork Mistakes Not to Make

One mistake players can make when they hear us talk about connections in matwork is to think that everything has to be connected to everything else. That is not exactly true. I'll write about that some other time, or you can read our book, which is coming along nicely, thank you.

A bigger mistake to make than thinking everything needs to be connected is to get so focused on one move that you forget to make connections. An error we have seen too many times in competition is when a player is attempting an armbar against an opponent who is resisting very strongly, as in STEP 1 below.

Often what happens in this position is - nothing. There is no Step 2. The player on the top exerts a lot of effort trying to get the armbar but the player on the bottom has both arms locked together resisting. The referee stops the match and both players get up.

When I get some more time, I will write about what SHOULD happen in Step 2. I only have a step 2, but Ronda has steps 2 through 9. (I counted. And took pictures.)

There should be no escaping your lethal matwork!

I talked before about transition from standing to matwork, both for armbars , and for pins .

For example, Ronda could start in this position, grab his wrist, put her foot above his knee and end up in a position like the one below.

In the post about armbars, I talked about moving from standing to matwork, started out like Ronda in the photo above (except shorter, older and less blonde) and ended up in this position.

There is a second kind of transition and that is when you move from one matwork technique to another.

In the armbar photo above, the person in the armbar could have tried to escape by twisting his arm so that instead of his elbow being pointed toward the ceiling it is toward the floor.


If he does, switch to COMBINATION #1 , which Ronda had helpfully demonstrated below.

Ronda could not get him into the position she intended at first. No worries, because she has practiced for this. She locks his arm tight against her body, and arches for the armbar.

What if that doesn’t work? He tries a forward roll to get away. Ronda keeps hold of his arm and rolls with him, going for COMBINATION #2

If she can stop his roll right here, she’ll lock his arm to her body and arch.

Ronda won a match in her first world cup, the London Open, with this exact armbar. What if it STILL doesn’t work and he rolls all of the way over? Then you go for COMBINATION #3, follow him over and do the same armbar from your back.

Let’s recap, then. You start from standing and go to one armbar, pushing down against the elbow with your leg and pulling up with both hands. If he turns, you lock the arm against your body, and arch, trying a second armbar. If the twists on to his stomach, lock his arm against your body and push-up, trying a third armbar. If he tries a forward roll, follow him, lock the arm against your body and arch, doing a fourth armbar.

MATWORK “SECRETS” – Smoother, More, Faster, Better - Part 2

It was the first time the Panamerican Games had a women’s judo division. I can’t speak for the rest of the competitors, but I know I was nervous. I’d had a good run, won a lot of tournaments lately but that only made it worse. When I told Dr. James Wooley, the team manager and a two-time Olympian that I was stressed because no matter how much I trained I knew that there was a possibility I could still make a mistake in a match. He laughed at me and said, 

“You’re thinking about it all wrong. You don’t have to be perfect to win this tournament  You don’t need to never make a mistake. You just need to go out there and in each match make one less mistake than the other person.”

How to do armbars without a mistake

When you do an armbar, lock the opponent's arm against your body. You should not be using your arms trying to pull the person's arm in any direction. The most efficient way to do an armbar is to have the opponent's arm tight against your body, between your legs. If the opponent is on his back, as in the example below, rotate towards his head as Karo is doing here

LOCK THE ARM AGAINST YOUR BODY!

Karo has perfect form as he has no space between his body and Rob's arm.

When you are in the position above arch your hips, either the person will give up or the elbow will dislocate.

I'd just like to point out here that although these two gentlemen are at grappling practice, the technique they are demonstrating is EXACTLY the judo technique, juji gatame, with no modification whatsoever. Karo is, in fact, a judo black belt.

P.S. Rob, who is also a judo player, wanted me to point out that he in fact LET Karo get him in the armbar just so I could get good pictures and there is no possibility that does not involve shackles, snipers and a troop of little boy scouts in which Karo could actually get him into a position where he would be required to tap out.

P.P.S. Thanks to both of you for taking a few minutes away from practice to pose for pictures.