How to Escape the Mount Position in Jiujitsu
I get it. Escapes are hard.
It’s not easy trying to remember every single positional or technical detail your instructors are teaching you in live training. It’s even harder to remember these critical details when you have someone absolutely mauling you from the top position.
It takes years and years of practice in order to become proficient with your mount escapes. Often times, the ability to escape has NOTHING to do with the technical details but rather, in the conceptual details.
For example… How often have you tried to escape the mount position and you’re doing everything right only to fail over and over again?
You ask yourself what you’re doing wrong and you’re hoping that the harder you try, you’ll eventually be able to find an answer?
Now, what if I told you, escapes are quite simple… There are just a few important concepts you need to understand and a few simple mistakes you need to avoid.
I’ll talk about them on this page. Now, before you continue, this won’t be a technical step by step post. I’m going to assume you’ve been training for a little bit (at least a couple of months) and you already know at least one or two mount escapes. This post is simply to help you become BETTER at your mount escapes in jiu-jitsu.
Now, the biggest mistakes in escaping the mount position in jiu-jitsu are usually the result of
A) Not knowing how to off-balance properly
B) Not knowing how to properly use “frames”
C) Trying to attack the position “statically” and not “dynamically”
D) Not understanding WHERE the vulnerability in the position is
This page will help you with A and B by showing you how to correct some of the most common mistakes beginners have escaping the mount.
I’ll also show you resources on how to tackle C and D.
Let’s begin.
First off, let’s talk about balance. I always tell my students that the most techniques fail because one of three variables. One of those 3 variables is “balance”. If your opponent has balance, you won’t be able to escape effectively.
In my opinion, the ability to off-balance in the mount position (or any bad position) is one of the most important skills everyone needs to learn in order to escape mount properly. If your opponent is off-balance, they cannot attack. Therefore, while you are escaping, you need to be figuring out HOW to continuously off-balance your opponent so you can escape without getting caught.
Before we learn how to off-balance in the mount, however, we need to understand HOW TO FRAME in the mount position. If you can’t frame, you won’t be able to off-balance so let’s start here. This video will show you how to improve your frames and help you avoid a common mistake.
Now, the next step when it comes to off-balancing and removing base (off-balancing) is to cover this common mistake of “reaching”.
Remember this very important thing: If you are reaching, you are EXPOSING your limbs which leave them vulnerable to submission. Always keep your elbows tucked and your feet connected to the ground in order to have an effective bridge!
And now we get to the meat of this post which is how to effectively avoid big mistakes when trying to remove/off-balance your opponent.
Ok, so this should tackle problems A and B. If you’ve watched these videos, you should by now be able to clean up some of the mistakes YOU might be making escaping from the mount position in jiu-jitsu.
Dynamic Problem Solving: Advanced Mount Escapes for Jiu-jitsu
With that said, let’s tackle one of the BIGGEST problems as you move from “beginner” to “advanced” and that is not understanding the dynamic component of training.
If you’re doing everything right, and your techniques STILL are not working consider this: Jiu-jitsu is dynamic. It requires that you solve problems in a moving, real-time fashion. In other words, escaping mount in jiu-jitsu becomes more “complex”.
The reality is, your mount escapes will still be “simple”. You just have to understand how to adapt to an ever-changing problem.
With that said, here’s a “freebie” from my private YouTube channel. It will cover how to escape the mount “dynamically” so you can start understanding how to escape mount at an advanced level.
[If you want to check out part 2, check out this link]Escaping Mount: More Resources
Alright, I hope you found this helpful! Please be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you found these useful. Leave a reply on the videos if you were able to use them effectively OR if you had any issues with them.
Last but not least, I did mention the “vulnerability” component to escaping mount. I’ll have that up next on my substack (this is my paid newsletter where I share all my tips/tricks/hacks that I teach in my private lessons).
It’s chock FULL of information you probably miss in class.
Be sure to check it out here in case you want to get better, faster! (Free Trials ARE available!