When Unorthodox Beats Better

This week we’re talking about some unorthodox techniques used by “worse” grapplers to win exchanges and even steal fights. In the Premium Notebook we’ll be taking a closer look at Deandre Corbe’s violent offense that won him the Sapateiro Invitational this past weekend. If you want a closer look at a unique prospect winning with innovative training methods you have to read this section.

Now let’s get into it.

What's In Today's Letter?

• First Things First

• Technical Takeaways: Unorthodox Ways To Win Exchanges

• Premium Notebook: Deandre Corbe's Violent Offense

• Links: Some Lessons On The Empty Half Guard

• The Most Important News

• Share And Support

I teach jiujitsu for a living. That means I spend a ton of time watching grappling and MMA so I can see what actually works and teach it to people.

One of the most enjoyable experiences for me is seeing fighters that shouldn’t beat their opponent anywhere on the mat win exchanges with rare, weird, and unorthodox techniques.

Because there’s not a lot going on in MMA right now, I want to take a look at three BJJ legends, Demian Maia, Roger Gracie, and Andre Galvao; and see where some of their opponents surprised them in their fighting career. Let’s start with Demian Maia.

Below Maia is working to pass Rory MacDonald’s guard. The Canadian had other plans.

At the end of the fight MacDonald got a bit more acrobatic with how he stood back up.

Maia was expecting MacDonald to reach for under and over hooks to try for more classic butterfly hook sweeps. He thinks they’re playing Brazilian jiu-jitsu. But MacDonald is hardly even using a guard, much less competing on Maia’s terms. He’s playing “get the fuck off me” so he just kicks into Maia until he has room to get back to his feet.

Let’s move on to the legendary Roger Gracie.

At worst, Roger Gracie is one of the three best Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitors of all time. He was never submitted at black belt, and he is the only person to submit 8 people at one ADCC World Championships to win both his weight class title and the absolute division.

Gracie only had one fight in the UFC. He met Tim Kennedy and he even made it to Kennedy’s back. Usually that’s a death sentence. 71% of Gracie’s submission wins in Brazilian jiu-jitsu came from chokes and more than half of those came after Gracie took an opponent’s back.

Generally in Brazilian jiu-jitsu people escape the back by sliding their shoulders onto the mat. This forces the person attacking the back to try to come on top and take mount. Above, it looks like Gracie expected this pattern, but Kennedy just spun inside to surprise Gracie and win the exchange. That probably saved him in this fight.

Andre Galvao is more of a tank than a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor. The 5’7” man regularly competed at 195 pounds and did absolute divisions in grappling competitions.

In MMA Galvao fought at 170. That made him a pressure passing machine. When he was fighting in Strikeforce, Galvao tried to use that pressure against Luke Stewart.

This sweep wasn’t a one and done either. Stewart hit this same one in the final round.

MMA is the most interesting sport in the world because there are so many ways to win a fight. Sure, technically, if it’s not a decision it’s a submission or a (T)KO. But how did we arrive at that end?

Was it a knockout? Okay, punch, kick, knee, or something else? And to where?

What about the submissions? Were they attacking chokes or joint locks? Were those joint locks only to set up other submissions? Were they even real submission attempts at all? Or were they just using the submissions to give themself the space to get back up and try for a knockout?

There are an uncountable numbers of ways a fist fight in a cage can end early. Generally this pushes people to study and train what works most often. That’s why so many people attack rear naked chokes instead of Suloev stretches and twisters when they get on the back.

But that doesn’t mean you should’t train unorthodox attacks. To the contrary, some of the best fighters find ways to do weird things so they can surprise their opponents and win the exchange, if not the whole fight.

Just look at Jon Jones’s entire career. His success hinged on his creativity and unorthodoxy.

Right now in the jiujitsu world there is a coach using unorthodox coaching methods to run his gym. Greg Souders of Standard Jiujitsu claims to never drill, nor teach techniques. Instead, Souders uses what is known as the constraints led approach for coaching. That’s a fancy way of saying that he organizes training by setting up games and tasks that reflect the demands of the skills he’s trying to teach so his students can self organize their bodies on their own to learn the optimal way for them to perform.

His argument and explanations have evolved as he’s gained more and more notoriety. I don’t care to relitigate them here. But I will say, one of his athletes won a prestigious $100,000 event this weekend so he has to be doing something right.

Souders’s student Deandre Corbe used a violent blend of wrestling, pressure, and opportunistic leg attacks to win the Sapateiro Invitational. Now we’re going to take a closer look at how Corbe did it below.