🪨 Make them carry your weight… from the bottom?!?

Is that even possible in jiu-jitsu? Mike Mahaffey from Old Bastard BJJ says yes.

In jiu-jitsu, top players should make the bottom player carry their weight... but did you know the reverse applies, too?

In this week’s chat with Mike Mahaffey in BJJ Mental Models episode 398 (link here), Mike expanded on one of the core tenets for his “old bastard” style of jiu-jitsu: make them carry your weight.

His big insight was how relevant this remains when you’re the bottom player.

From top positions, gravity is our friend; we can pressure our opponent by leaning on them (as long as we don’t give up our center of gravity). We can pin them down like a giant human-sized paperweight. But how do we make them carry our weight from bottom positions, like the guard, when gravity is working against us?

Maybe you can’t be a paperweight from the bottom, but you can still abuse gravity: you can be an anchor.

When you play closed guard and clamp your legs around your opponent, that clamping structure locks your body onto theirs. You’re supposed to be in charge! But ask yourself: “Do you feel in charge?”

You’re probably asking yourself, ”Steve, isn’t that a quote from Bane in The Dark Knight Rises?” And the answer, of course, is yes. But the point remains: it’s not enough to merely clamp onto your opponent from the bottom; you also need to make them carry your weight while they’re on top.

Ever played closed guard and felt like there was nothing stopping your opponent from standing up and entering into a passing sequence? That’s probably because you were focused too much on clamping with your legs, but not enough on dragging them down with gravity.

If the only control mechanism you have is a clamp, you’re actually quite vulnerable. Because you’ve become a tetherball: without disrupting your opponent’s base, they can pick you up and swing you around. Clamps without control are a liability, not an advantage.

We make our closed guard more effective by using gravity. As Mike points out, you do this by lifting your butt off the ground. Are your butt cheeks glued to the ground when you’re playing closed guard? That’s likely a problem, because you’re relying entirely on your leg clamp to hold your opponent down, and that’s probably not enough. When you lift your butt off the ground, you add gravity into the equation: they must now attempt to stand and/or break your guard while also carrying your weight.

It sounds dumb, but so much of this is about getting your ass cheeks off the ground. Jiu-jitsu is just a dance after all, and like all dances, it comes down to how you use your butt.

It’s simple math: Clamp onto your opponent + lift yourself off the ground = they have to carry your weight.

When they’re forced to carry your weight, they always have to work. And that’s ultra important when you’re an old bastard like me and Mike.