Hitting the Omoplata from the Butterfly Guard

14 Dec, 2015

Many people use the butterfly guard only as a sweeping position. But that’s a mistake because you can also hit powerful submissions from the butterfly guard.

In fact attacking with sweeps sets up submissions, and attacking with submissions sets up sweeps. Attacking with both from any guard position makes your game so much more effective; why would you want to limit yourself to only one or the other?

My friend, BJJ black belt and world champion Brandon ‘Wolverine’ Mullins, recently showed me a way to set up a sneaky way to set up the omoplata armlock. It uses a failed sweep and a hip shift to expose your opponent’s arm for the omoplata.

(At the end of the clip below there’s some cool footage of Brandon hitting the omoplata from butterfly guard in no gi competition.)

In addition to the setup and the attack Brandon also showed me a a super-powerful finish for the omplata that you can use to tap out people way bigger than yourself. This finish relies on you threading your outside leg under his body: not only does this give you a ton of leverage on his shoulder, but it also stops him from doing the forward roll to escape your attack.

The 5 minute video showing both the setup and the finish is below:

P.S. This technique is just a very small part of what’s covered in the brand new ‘Non-Stop Butterfly Guard‘ mobile app that I’ve just released together with Brandon ‘Wolverine’ Mullins.

It’s an incredible instructional, more than 2 hours long, that will give you a complete gameplan for the Butterfly Guard, including techniques, strategies, transitions and combinations.

This mobile app is available for Apple, Android and Kindle devices. It’s a really amazing BJJ instructional, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Check it out at the links below: