As you may recall, if you had an opportunity to read our last article, we entitled it the stand up fight and we talked extensively about the closing of distance and how important that is.  That is equally important to a ground fighter such as a high school wrestler, a football player, a judoka, and jujitsu person.  With ground fighters you will find a different philosophy than what you will find with some karate people and with boxers.  They like to maintain distance and do stand up fighting; the ground fighter or grappler will close the ground on you as quickly as he can and it is his intent from the get go to take you to the ground and end up in what we refer to as a top mount position and disable his opponent, but the intent is different.  His intent is to do a take down and again get in a mount position, whereas a street fighter or the stand up fighter or boxer doesn't want to go to the ground and is not looking for submission; he is looking for a knockout. 

The Gracie family has probably done more to popularize the ground fight than any system.  In the early and mid 90's, they introduced the ultimate challenge type fights and or the octagon type fight and what we found was the stand up fighter or boxer was in trouble once he got took off his feet.  The Tae-Kwon-Do fighter or kicker is in trouble once he is off his feet and on the ground, so they have started cross training, and nearly every good karate school or martial artists will indeed cross train in both the stand up fight and the ground fighting.  So these differences are more in the gray area now than they used to be.  They are not nearly as distinct.  We have many fine Tae-Kwon-Do stylist and many fine karate fighters now that cross train in ground fighting as well as stand up fighting.  Their goal is to go to the ground and they can do it.  There are 15-20 popular take downs; some from the rear, some from the side, some from the front.  Probably the one you will see more than any one else is the typical old football tackle.  It is very effective for a big person.  If they don't know what they are doing with it, they can accept some punishment on the way in such as broken noses, knee lifts to the face, etc.  However, again, if they are a tough fighter, sometimes they can accept that punishment and come on in and do the take down and win the fight.  Most trained ground fighters will try to cover the distance, end up in a clinch where they have tied up the hands, and either do a hip throw or a double or single leg takedown or something like that.  So the 3 stages of ground fighting is close the distance, do a clinch, and then do a take down.  Once a take down is complete, the goal is to end up in what grapplers refer to as a top mount.  The preferred position is to have the knees up underneath the armpit, with your bottom sitting on their solar plexus taking their wind, and your hands basically controlling their biceps and their upper body by placing your hands on their biceps. If it is a sport play and all you want to do is control the fighter, then you are in good shape.  If it is street fighting and you are wanting to do as little damage as you have to, and you are letting the fighter cool off a little bit, then this is an excellent position to be in.  If you have to deliver hand techniques, the person on top has the reach and extension with the shoulders and the turning of the upper body that will add a little bit of distance to their strike and so the person on top can hit the person on the bottom with a punch or heel palm smash, and the person on the bottom can't reach the guy on the top.  It is a definite advantage to be on top plus the person on top has all their body weight and shoulders in behind that punch.  For me personally, the worst place I could be in a fight would be to be on my stomach with a fighter to my back applying chocks from the back where I cannot see him or striking from the rear.  The second worst position you could be in would be on the bottom with about a 250-300 pounder sitting on your chest delivering punches to your face.  For the fighter that is on the bottom, there are several techniques he can do to attempt to reverse or better his position.  First of all, he needs to keep his elbows in where those knees can't slide up under his armpit.  We practice what we call a swim technique, which allows us to move our body up and get the heavy fighter on top of us down on the lower part of our stomach instead of up on our chest or solar plexus where he is cutting our wind off.  After these are accomplished, if your fighter is delivering punches, then at the exact moment that punch is delivered, you can bump him with your hips, make him extend his hands forward and place them on the ground for balance.  When that happens you can trap the arm and roll your opponent.  If he is throwing punches and yet keeping his body weight back, then we practice the swim technique for blocking punches.  If he is comfortably sitting on you and has no intention of getting up, and is not throwing punches either, then we raise forward trapping the wrist on one side and a flying arm bar and moving to the side as we bring it forward and dislocating the shoulder In essence getting out of that move.  Just because you are on the bottom position does not mean that you automatically lose; there are some collar chokes and wind chokes and different things that you can do, but I would say to you that you are in a very precarious situation when you are on the bottom. 

When you in the top mount position, we use a flicking technique to keep their hands off our knees.  The guy on the bottom will often push on your knees to try to get you to move back or off him.  We need to keep his hand flick; we need to ride and keep our balance and try not to put our hands forward where he can trap an arm, etc.  So because you are in either position, top mount or bottom mount, does not mean that you automatically win, but definitely the top mount is preferred.

When you talk of chokes, there are many different types of chokes that we see applied.  One of the problems with chokes as far as street fighting is concerned is that many times we train with a gi top or uniform and on the street, you won't have that.  With a shirt that has a collar you have a much better chance of applying chokes.  For a fighter who has on a t-shirt or is bare-chested, it is very difficult to apply some of the collar chokes.  When we talk about chokes, these normally fall into 2 classifications, a blood choke or a wind choke.  A blood choke is where you cut the collateral artery or blood flow, and the other one where you cut the wind or the breathing off from the front of the throat.  There is probably 10-15 chokes in each category that could be done.  But I would caution any young fighters not to just train with a uniform, because there are many of those that you cannot apply if there is no collar.\

Probably the most popular choke you will see is the naked choke.  This is applied from the rear where they person's bicep is against the collateral artery of their opponent and their forearm is on the other side and they end up getting their own bicep and applying a lock.  You will see this often in the movies, and Chuck Norris will do this some on Walker Texas Ranger episodes.  It is a very effective technique.  There is no damage done to the opponent, such as broken noses, blacken eyes, etc.  The dangers are with older people, if the guy has a problem with blood pressure, you have to be careful and not hold that choke too long.

Chokes are a favorite of mine for disabling an opponent without doing any damage to him.   

Let’s turn to locks now.  You have wrist locks, arm bars, ankle locks, mid calf locks, knee locks, lots of different types of locks that can be applied. One of the favorites for the guy that is on top mount, and the guy on the bottom is a very strong person, doing the bench press type technique to get him off, is just place your hand on his chest and step around his head and sit down into an arm bar.  This is a very effective technique.  Some of the fighters and been trained and these techniques have been used for several years now. Some folks are learning to roll out of that or to reach and get hold of their wrists and if they are strong enough to do it, curl their opponent, and so it is not always a given that you will be able to apply the arm lock, but it is a good technique. Wrist locks, many different angles you can take on that.  Shoulder locks, a lot of these are good.

The locks, as far as doing long term damage, are more dangerous than the chokes.  For a person that has their rotary cup torn in their shoulder, it is very painful and as a usual thing you are looking at 5-6 months recovery.  Whereas, with a choke, normally in 1-2 minutes, he is back and no damage is done.

The ground fighting is a wonderful system and it needs to be a part of every serious martial artists training.  I would caution ground fighters about the hazards of ground fighting.  It is one thing to train in the karate school where you have padding and matting and everything is even and on the same level, and you don't have any obstacles there.  It is another thing to be in the top mount on asphalt with your knees digging in the concrete and trying to do an effective technique.  So there are other disadvantages as well, fighting multiple opponents can be difficult from the ground. If you are sitting on one person’s chest and he has 4 buddies that is swinging ball bats at you, you may be in trouble. 

But it is definitely something you need to train in and know about.  We are lucky now to be 15-20 years into the Gracie system and Jujitsu , so there are many qualified instructors now that can teach this style of fighting.  

 

Pete Mills,
Grandmaster, Isshin-ryu Karate