Control is not binary. It is progressive. As you move from no control to maximum control there is a long series of control states. Your goal is to keep progressing down the road of maximum control until you get a finish. Of course, your opponent is fighting back. They have their own control in mind, and the back and forth for control is the essence of our sport.
You need to win this battle. In order to do so, you need control momentum. What say you? First, we need to define control.
What Is Control?
Control is when you are effectively executing your game, and they can’t execute theirs. This seems simple enough. There is an element of this that involves risk. Your open guard may be controlling your opponent, but at any moment the connections could change and you are on the defensive. This is much less likely in the back position. Jiu Jitsu hierarchy exists for a reason. Not all control is equal. Increasing control involves executing your game, shutting down theirs, and moving up the hierarchy. As a practical matter, this starts to get complicated. Things can go wrong. Transitions turn to scrambles, and scrambles can be lost.
To further dissect control, let’s break control into two categories. Physical control and decision control. There is certainly a Venn diagram here, for a good position allows for better decisions, and better decisions bring you to better positions. However, overlap is the point in understanding these two concepts.
Physical control we all know. You are crushing your opponent in the most devasting mount on the mat. They attempt to bump and move. Possibly even bench press you. But you stand victorious in your dominant position. This is physical control.
Decision control is when your decision forces a reaction. In a game of chess, if you threaten the king, the rules dictate the opponent must move the king. You have forced that move. If you threaten the queen, your opponent could accept the loss, but strategically this would be a poor decision. What if you threatened a knight or a pawn? These decisions start to become less obvious as the consequences change. So to in Jiu Jitsu. Can you force your opponent to make a decision by threatening their position? The nature of that threat will impact your opponent’s decision making process. Understanding this concept and using it effectively is decision control.
Gaining Momentum
We have touched on degrees of control, and types of control. When moving throughout the control landscape you need to create control momentum. Control momentum is when from one phase of the exchange to the next, you use your control to increase your level of control in the next phase. You are gaining more and more control as you progress towards a finish. Thought differently, we could call this exponential control progressions, but let’s keep this as simple as possible.
One example of momentum control would be to move from side control to mount with an underhook in place. Moving from side to mount is an increase in control from a hierarchy standpoint, but it becomes significantly more dominant when you make the transition with an underhook. In fact, top side with inside control is arguably better than mount with no inside control.
That is an example of using physical control to gain momentum. From mount, if you then threatened a choke and made your opponent stop framing your hips to start defending the choke, you are now using decision control. Even if the choke isn’t close to being successful, its existence forces a move.
Losing Momentum
This idea of momentum control seems simple enough, but it’s a concept that will help you make better decisions. As an example, you are in mount and go for an arm bar. Do you fall back? Do you stay on top? Is there a different attack that allows you to maintain top position?
If you fall back on the attack and lose the arm, you are now in bottom position, or best case scenario scrambling back to the top. Even if you are able to transition to an offensive guard position, you have just given up considerable control of your opponent. This is losing momentum.
Take this concept and build out your decision trees. Are your connections creating control momentum? Not all games will, but know the games that do so that you can use them when it matters most.