North-South Position

We were looking at what the options are when you are positioned at the persons head while rolling. If your opponent has their back on the ground, and you are at their head then we have a two basic options for positions. We have the 10 & 2 positions, and we have North-South or the 4-Corner Hold.
(The images in this post were 'borrowed' from one of the organisation instructors, friend, and coach - see more by clicking on the link at the sidebar to connect with his blog, The Gentle Art. Thanks Cane)

In class we limited ourselves to the Top 4-Corner hold or North-South position. We limited our game to a hold-down concept as well, which for us means no double arm wraps. This leads to more of a floating game as it leaves more space, and encourages more movement. We were putting our focus in taking away space and keeping the lock-down, so our arm positions were both arms over our opponent's arms and grabbing around the body or the belt. We drilled to keep this lock-down while the bottom person escaped to see what would happen, and what the bottom person was doing to facilitate escaping. What we found out was more about how we were holding top, and why than anything else. Our discoveries were...

3 Objectives of the position

1. Keep as much weight on your opponent as possible
2. Keep their back and shoulders on the mat and their body flat
3. Use your frames and limbs as outriggers as required 

By using this filter, we found that there were 3 basic depths of position. We had Deep North-South where our shoulders are pinning the opponents hips. There is (regular) North-South where the pressure is from our chest to our opponents chest, and we have Shallow North-South where our shoulders are pinning our opponents shoulders.

Getting out

From all 3 of these variations in position, we have found that one of our defensive postures works very well consistently. This is our Flying Monkey posture. The important aspects of the posture are that you tuck the bottom elbow way underneath you (you are lying on it fully), your head and jawline are in contact with the mats, the top arm is used to anchor your opponent (heavy frame), your bottom leg is bent with the knee toward your bottom elbow and toes pushing into the mat (for tripod ability), and lastly the top leg is 'flying' - meaning that the knee is pointing to the ceiling with the hips open wide.  

Take note of the bottom arm- it is deep! The rest of this posture
is similar but not exactly what we refer to as 'Flying Monkey'

The game from here is making enough space, so that you can gain this posture, and from the posture it will be very difficult for anyone to stop you from getting to quarter position and escaping. And that was it, the entire escape game was turning underneath them to get to quarters and shoot or attack or pull guard or whatever from there.


Next we reviewed some secondary escapes that were position and pressure dependent, each one only working for one of the ranges or depths mentioned above. I'm not going to bother reviewing them here as they are pretty position specific and if we are focusing on one aspect, I'd like it to be the posture and getting to your knees. Experiment with things like Hydraulic escapes, Pendulum escapes to your knees or to pull guard, and rolling with leg attachments much like you would from an Oma-Plata sweep if you can get their knee to the mat. Anyways this should be enough to keep you busy until next class....