Guard Concepts: Tie-Down & Shoulder Drag

When your opponent is inside your closed guard, you can break their posture based on their initial action, such as re-centering, posturing up, or trying to open up to break your guard. Start the posture break and then go into a tie-down, where you can hug or cup the head, grab the back of the lapel, and then go over their back and control the shoulder.

1. Break down your opponent's posture, move over, and hug the head. Hip escape, and this hand goes over the shoulder, breaking them in at a 45-degree angle.
2. Clamp your guard and hip escape back as far as you want to get to that distance where you feel comfortable and your opponent feels uncomfortable and defensive.
3. Go over their shoulder, hip escape a little bit more, and clamp them down. Start to work from here.
4. If your opponent muscles up into your guard, bring them over and switch your hips again, ending up in the same position as before with arm isolation.
5. Go into the grips and do your work from here. If you want to tie down again, go this hand over the shoulder and gain control.
6. If your opponent is hard to keep down and is coming back into your guard, use your elbow and forearm to frame on the side of their head as you do the drag.

This technique can be combined with everything else you've done from here. It's connected and links up with other techniques. These ideas, concepts, or principles of using that angle and physics will be the foundation on which you can build your guard game in whichever direction you want. If you're more sweep oriented, you can combine this with sweeps. If you like to take the back, you can do back attacks. If you just like to finish from your back, you can do that.

Pay attention to these things, play with them in the dojo, play with them in competitions. Discover the space, discover the distance, discover the angles, and all this is going to apply to every aspect of jiu-jitsu. It's going to be a more effective jiu-jitsu with the least amount of effort possible.