Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Submission Wrestling has evolved into a battle of half guard – and there’s a wealth of resources on the techniques but it’s important that you set yourself up correctly for this so that’s what we’ll show here.

I treat half guard as a disadvantageous position that needs to be escaped from when I’m on bottom, and a guard that needs to be passed while on top, so anything I coach will come from that. It’s a more conservative approach than others would advocate.

This is the worst position you can be in underneath half guard. You’re on your back, your arms aren’t in an effective position, and your opponent can really apply pressure.

In reverse order of importance, you need to secure these three things: an underhook, his “trapped” leg, and defend against the shoulder of justice.

If you turn your thumb towards his butt your underhook will be stronger. The underhook helps you get/stay on your side.

If you don’t secure your opponents trapped leg, you’re making it very easy for him to pass into side control or mount. There’s two basic ways to trap his leg. The first is used if your opponent keeps his leg tight to his butt. The advantage for him doing this is it makes it harder for you to sweep him. Triangling your legs is a simple, easy and effective way to secure his leg.

A lot of the time, your opponent will stretch his leg out, this is usually done to apply greater pressure on your neck. In this case, we look for a lockdown. To do the lockdown, place your outside leg in between his legs, but underneath your trapped leg. Now place your trapped/inside leg underneath his trapped leg.

You can apply a lot of pain pressure to his calf muscle if you set this up right. What you need to ensure is that your left shin (according to the picture) is close to his knee. When you extend both your legs you’re doing a calf slicer. Some people have tapped out to this. Not me though, I don’t feel pain

Both these aspects of a secure half guard pale in comparison to defending a shoulder of justice. You can apply the most pressure through half guard so you need to defend this! The first method (which I personally prefer) is to used a Crazy Monkey style defence, i.e. run your hand back through your hair to stop him getting his bicep across your face.

As you can see in that photo, I’m making myself as compact as possible. The more compact you are the better when you’re on bottom. Think of yourself like a spring, the more compact you are the powerfully you can explode and sweep/escape.

Another method is the squirrel grip on your opponents bicep. Kavanagh prefers this method as it allows for tracking the arm.

You need to be careful though and avoid over tracking and extending your arm. If you do this, it makes it easier for your opponent to swim back in and get a shoulder of justice on.

If you’ve set everything up correctly you won’t stay in half guard bottom very long, as you’ll have opportunities to sweep or take the back that you should take.

What we found in drilling this is people still have a tendency to lie on their back even with everything set up. You need to continue creating space from underneath by moving your hips away and turn your stomach towards the floor – your belly button must be facing the floor, not your shoulders.

Video of the half guard drill in action (we would have recorded more but the battery ran out )