How To Defend Against Deep Half Guard

A few weeks ago, Jeff went over some Half Guard techniques in class. It was pretty good stuff. One area we covered was the primary reasoning you might want to capture someone in Half Guard in the first place, what to do from there and the steps taken in between. The other area we covered was escaping. We went over three escapes, with one being my favorite that I’ve been using over the past week with varied success.

An area we didn’t cover was “Deep Half Guard.” It’s an advanced technique and I’ll admit that I don’t know much about it. It is something that I am beginning to dig into though because as I approach a higher level of training, I’m becoming more and more responsible for my own success.

Please take a look at these following two videos by Ryan Hall to get a feel for the level of technique this is.

Ryan Hall – Deep Half Guard – Deep Half Entries

Ryan Hall – Deep Half Guard – Deep Half Attacks

What I want to show you in this post is something that Jeff stresses quite frequently – and that’s not to get yourself in trouble by avoiding the bad situation in the first place. Jeff likes to use the example of blocking someone who just passed your guard and who is reaching for a cross face. If you can turn your body to face them and then block the arm that’s coming toward your neck with your arm, then shrimp to re-pull guard, you are in good shape. The video I am posting below covers a similar concept, and that’s blocking a high level Jiu-Jitsu player from getting you all tangled up in Deep Half Guard, that, relatively speaking, very few people know enough about to use.

So take a look at the video below to familiarize yourself with defending against a technique I see becoming more and more popular. As we all grow in rank together, there’s really no place else to turn other than these types of techniques.

How To Pass Deep Half Guard