Contents
- 1 8 Basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Skills You Need to Know
- 1.1 1 – The ability to relax while you work out
- 1.2 2 – Carry the weight
- 1.3 3 – Bridging and Shrimping
- 1.4 4 – Learn how to make the correct sockets
- 1.5 5 – Break your opponent’s guard and pass
- 1.6 6 – Escaping from side control or side mount
- 1.7 7 – The Arm Lock from the guard
- 1.8 8 – Scissor sweep
- 1.9 Conclusions
Basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills that you need to know.
8 basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills you need to know.
Today I want to tell you 8 basic skills that you need to have to develop a good Brazilian Jiu Jitsu game or fight in general.
Is it just 8?
these are the only “bases” I need to know?
Of course NOT! but surely you need to start with these 8 basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills that you need to know..
Another instructor could probably make you a completely different list from this one but if you learn and internalize these 8 I guarantee
you’re
already becoming a better fighter.
- How many times have you wondered what are the basics?
- Or the important concepts?.
- Everyone says things like, “Study basic techniques.”
- But what does it mean to study basic techniques?
- Who defines a technique as a basis?.
In fact, often the most experienced use their own basic techniques.
Often the best fight with simple techniques but to fight in a simple way you have to know a lot, it is a process that can appear twisted but it is so in any artistic expression.
8 Basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Skills You Need to Know
1 – The ability to relax while you work out
Acquiring this ability is critical if you want to progress in Jiu Jitsu and in the fight.
If you train without the ability to relax, sooner or later you get tired, become exhausted or away in overtraining and more likely to go to injury.
Not only that, but the formation of a competitive mindset that is always in tension slows down your progress and over time brings it down.
It has been shown that people learn faster when they are relaxed than when they are under pressure and tense.
Now I know, you’re going to tell me, but it’s not easy and that all this is easier said than done.
How can I learn to relax?
Controlling your ego is the primary factor at stake when you practice, if you can do this by abandoning your ego, you start to be calm and controlled and everything appears clearer, more “forward”, everything seems to flow.
Nobody likes to lose.
Ego is your hell and it is your ego that wants to dominate, control and win at all costs.
Let me tell you a little secret:
You want to be the best jiu-jitsu fighter in the world even if you’re probably fighting to be the best guy in the academy.
Okay, so what?
Remember that being the best is a fleeting and painful position because it requires you to always be at the top.
You always have someone behind your ass, trying to take over your first place and sooner or later, someone better than you comes along.
So I’m not telling you that you don’t have to train to be the best but not just focus on that.
Forget about winning or losing – put your attention to learning and technical/athletic development.
It’s a much better long-term strategy, trust me.
You have to be relaxed while doing sparring or competitions because you give more space to your skills.
Your ability to learn and perform techniques correctly on the carpet is connected to your mood which is in turn connected to your breath.
If your breathing is smooth and even it is likely that your movements will be fluid.
But if you are panting and breathless, I can assure you that your movements will not be effective and really ugly even to watch (which somehow matters less but that has a lot of impact).
Another interesting thing about breath control is that it can also help manage the ego.
By focusing on the flow of your breaths and breaths and the movement of your breath through the body, you will be able to dissociate largely from any of your internal voices that can distract you from sparring or performing the technique.
2 – Carry the weight
Carrying the weight and directing it correctly to use it to your advantage is an important aspect because your ground techniques don’t work or limit their effectiveness a lot if you don’t know how to take advantage of the weight and you just use force.
This applies both in attack, not only to use strength and defense to direct the weight to your advantage to get out and take the advantage.
It’s important that you learn to feel your opponent and put the weight in the right position to make your opponent feel the pressure without using force.
This is a very “invisible” concept but that should be one of the first things you have to try to learn, it’s certainly not simple and to feel it and understand it you have to train and sparring with experienced people, you would immediately notice the difference and what I’m telling you.

3 – Bridging and Shrimping
I once heard an interesting analogy, which compared these two techniques to language, as if it were a conversation.
If you consider grappling as a language, bridging and shrimping can be considered as vowels.
These two movements are crucial.
These are two of the most important examples you need to know in your collection of movements that ‘sew’ all your techniques and move together.
Learn these movements with practice not just doing the movement alone.
These two movements are versatile and can be incorporated into the techniques.
You have to develop a great “bang” because with little it can give you a lot of advantage in your training and sparring sessions.
They are two very technical movements but also very useful and powerful that pull you out of many “uncomfortable” situations.
Now just because you do these exercises a few times each during the warm-up before class doesn’t mean that you’re doing it properly or that you’re seeing their potential up close.
Train a lot, perfect and improve bridging and shrimping.
Consider that there are different variations on each of these two techniques.
Spend time researching and practicing these two techniques and I guarantee you’ll see improvements quickly in your fight game.
A good job is also to do athletic preparation exercises that go to enhance these two movements.


4 – Learn how to make the correct sockets
One of the fundamental aspects in the general struggle is that if you can’t grab it, then you can’t fight.
An effective socket has three components:
1) The strength of your hands.
Your fingers and hands after a few months of training become stronger but if you speed up the process, you need to do specific workouts to add to your training.
There are countless equipment and types of exercises to strengthen the grip, each of which I am sure has some value for you. Do
your research.
2) Efficient grip.
No matter how strong your grip is, if you hold on for a long time with too much force, your forearms will feel the fatigue and your grip will weaken.
So it’s important to understand how hard to hold and not use more strength than what you really need.
3) Where to hold is vital.
You can have the strongest grip, know the most effective gripping technique in the world, but if you treat the wrong things you will have enormous difficulty in generating the necessary amount of leverage to achieve your goals.
Where you’re going is very important.
5 – Break your opponent’s guard and pass
Breaking the guard is by far one of the most difficult aspects in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and wrestling systems.
When you fight with a guy who has strong legs and active hips being at his guard can be an absolute hell.
Exiting the guard can be done by making it easier to stand or kneel. In fact you have to distinguish them and call one the “standing guard break” and the other “the break of guard on your knees”, because most of the time you are standing only for the first part, which is the “Breaking”, the opening of the guard where your opponent’s legs cross on the lower back.
Once his legs are open, you can proceed to pass the guard from a standing position or kneeling possibly with the opposite one to the side you have opened.
But either way, to open the guard of an average wrestler you almost always have to stand up.
Sure, there are some techniques for breaking the guard even from on your knees, but you have to try these techniques against someone tall enough and with strong leg strength and let me know if you can.
Experience the two possibilities a lot because you have to figure out how to make the technique work based on your opponent’s guard’s perception.
Study the correct technique and variations, you have to use the guard break best suited to that opponent because it is not the same for everyone.
This is also at the beauty of the struggle.
6 – Escaping from side control or side mount
Escapes is extraordinary and enjoyable, makes you enjoy, because it goes to undo your opponent’s attack plan.
Exits up to at least the purple belt must be the most important aspect of your fight game and the escape from side control is the most important part of the defensive aspect for your game.
After much practice, teaching and refining the technique this aspect of the fight and Jiu Jitsu I identified three aspects fundamental to getting an exit in the right way.
1) Important, you need to protect your neck at all times. You can have the world mile output technique, but if you’re getting suffocated you’re not helping your outing. Keep at least one hand to protect your neck at all times.
2) According to very important bridging and shrimping, do these names sound familiar to you?. Make them become such. The key is to learn how to perform these two moves with the right time and combine them. The one (bridging) that usually precedes the other (Shrimping). There are many more details but I will deal with this in an article.
3) Finally, you need to learn Combos for “replacement guard” and “go insert your knees” and get out. If you learn how to do these two things you have a good chance in 90 percent of cases in all side control situations. Again, if you want more information, please email me.
7 – The Arm Lock from the guard
This is one of the techniques I teach my private students.
Although in application it is simple, it is actually a complex technique with a sequence of precise movements but learning and storing a complex sequence from start to finish is of great benefit to beginner students.
The sense of joy that you see in students to close the whole sequence from a feeling of deep confidence and satisfaction, I can not explain the neuroscience behind this result, but my experience tells me that once they have done this technique well and have completed it at least once, learning all the subsequent moves becomes easier.
In addition, understanding the arm lock from the guard teaches you several key concepts in grappling, including control, contact or adhesion, head control, creating angles of attack, using the core joined to the hip/buttock to leverage.
This technique is therefore very preparatory for those who start studying the struggle.
8 – Scissor sweep
Okay, I know there are dozens and dozens of techniques of projection or sweeping your feet.
Rickson Gracie considers scissors to be one of the most important of all.
And you know why?.
Scissor sweep is important because to do it properly you need to understand some principles that are fundamental to most projections, so this technique is preparatory for all the others you will learn, because it encompasses fundamental phases.
Control of the wrist and arm of the side where it sweeps.
If you don’t, you’ll never be able to complete the sweep even after you’ve tried a million times.
Pay close attention to this detail because it is the main factor that contributes to the failure of the sweep.
Increases the power of this sweep using the hips and trunk as opposed to the arms.
Most of the time, if you only use your arms to create an unbalanced movement you operate inefficiently.
Observe how mistakenly beginners try to move their opponent almost exclusively with the force of their arms during this operation then look for the sweep with kicks to the legs but stops everything there, apart from the blow to the leg fails to project the opponent.
One thing that makes your opponent unbalanced is to raise the center of gravity.
With good sweep technique, you can use your leg forward and lapel grip to elevate your opponent’s hips by pulling it towards you.
This raises its center of gravity(basin)and makes it much easier to flip it over itself.
This is common in most sweeps/projections and imbalances.
Conclusions
Now what matters is that you put into practice these 8 tips on basic Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills that you need to know.
If you want to suggest more, write it in the comments.
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Stay Tuned! and learn the basic skills of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Street Fight Mentality & Fight Sport
Andrea