Ok how about this, if you're competing - roughly what an acceptable failure rate from bottom side control for you? I'm just trying to understand in broad terms, how frequently you could get caught from a certain position before you'd consider it a problem. Like for me, if i was escaping 411 more than 50% of the time, i'd be happy with that. Something like double outside ashi would be ~66% because if i got caught in DOA 3 times in a ~5 minute match then i'd say the problem wasn't my DOA escape but was my guard passing and i wouldn't want to bank on escaping it 3 times.

Yup, if you're escaping anything close to 50 percent or more of the time then this technique of theirs is not on your level.

Not sure how to interpret that, i mean i wouldn't expect to submit someone 50% of the time i get side control and I wouldn't be happy if i was getting submitted anything like that from side control. If we add in submit or advance the position then i might be 40% in top position but from bottom it would be ~5% against people my belt / new blues and rough size. Not saying i'm amazing, more that most whites and blues don't know how to attack running man. My point being that if turning into them led to me being submitted via a choke in anything like >10% of cases then it would be a significant step backwards.

If you're in the receiving end of a position that is considered dominant and you're escaping that position easily then your opponent is not good at that dominant position. Anyway - a lot of people have said running man is an inferior escape because you get your back taken. They're wrong. Just as you are wrong in statement that shrimping is an inferior escape because you get d'arced/guillotined. Escapes are inferior per definition. You can't win by escaping generally. And escapes are hard because you start from a mechanically disadvantageous position meaning that against ppl your level most escapes SHOULD fail and there SHOULD be the risk of getting submitted or getting stuck even worse.

Hate to break it to you but that discrepancy goes all the way :)

Not sure what to tell you. I train at a small gym so it's really difficult to assign percentages and probabilities to things like that due to smaller sample sizes of training partners. Also, with a smaller gym there are a lot of mismatches in terms of destroying someone/getting destroyed, etc. In my opinion competition is a superior measure. Even then, if you had video of all of your matches it would be a fairly significant time sink to evaluate and note all of the matches to focus on what was working/wasn't working. (my friend and I did this for his matches and breaking down a single match and writing up the appropriate notes for use ended up taking about 20-40 minutes each... he has a lot of match videos so it took a long time -- I'm not a serious enough competitor to bother with that myself). Passing and sweeping are the most common ways to score... when you're watching a black belt match you might notice that once elite black belts get to a dominant position.... they hardly ever escape. Lower belts or those in 'non-elite' categories, many escapes aren't necessary due to tactical perfection or strategic planning, but more often than not taking advantage of mistakes made by the person in the dominant position. tl;dr: I think you are trying to oversimplify something and making things more complicated in the process. Escaping is great, but there is a major difference between training in the gym and 'combat conditions' of competition.

Which part the imbalance or the ultra heavyweights or both? lol

If you're in the receiving end of a position that is considered dominant and you're escaping that position easily then your opponent is not good at that dominant position.

Can you please see my reply to Brad. I think there's a lot more nuance than this.

So you don't think there are any black belts who just baby bridge and don't shrimp to escape? None at all...

*change my mind* ... I'll bite, based on the charity principle, which is that you actually mean it. Wim is credited by Priit for the concept of Baby Bridge (inside/outside shoulder escapes) I bought two of Wim Deputter's series on BJJ Fanatics (highly recommend them! great primer on good body mechanics concepts) I'm pretty sure that even Wim, who very highly prefers Baby Bridges, wouldn't say that the hip escape is 100% useless. General Introduction to Mirroring Principle by Wim Deputter Vol 1 01:19 - Relation between frames, shrimping and bridging Shrimping : hips away, shoulders in Baby bridge : shoulders away, hip in Shrimping and bridging are opposites Yin is useless, all I need is yang no! Yang is useless, all we need is Yin! Pop psychology hat on : Reading between the lines of a white belt with a pattern of very strong opinions, I'd venture that what you're actually frustrated about is the way they train shrimping at your particular gym: solo, no context. As other's have pointed out, Danaher makes that point too; shrimping back and forth down the mats half-assed has limited to no value. there are better warm-ups. there are many ways to shrimp, and it's probably best done in pairs with someone switching sides for side control Shrimping is not just the hips moving away, it starts with good frames in the upper body, and it can be very useful to create space to insert your knee and attack with an armbar for example. Could luck putting on a d'Arce on Xande Ribeiro doing his 'elegant shrimp'. If shrimp = d'Arce, you're doing the essential 'framing' part of the move wrong.

...most people aren't as well rounded as they'd like to think. My reason for saying that is that the split in BJJ between guard players, top players, leg locks and generalists is not 25% each. There are way more guard players, especially in primarily Gi schools and there are way more leg lockers in NoGi. Genuine top game specialists are the rarest of the bunch in my experience, at least in the UK and maybe because wrestling is virtually non-existent in the UK.

You raise a very good point about styles here. When I got started I definitely gravitated toward top game due to the large proportion of training partners that emphasized guard work, etc. so getting going with passing kinda just 'made sense'.

If I get an underhook in bottom sidemount I won't leave it out high and wait for my head to be grabbed... I'll buy busy escaping and usually I get either turtle or guard top from ensuing scramble, the least I get is front headlock bottom and then I continue escaping or get stuck (in the sense of 'scramble is over, there's a more static established position for a while') in either front headlock or turtle bottom (which is still better than sidemount bottom imo).

You raise a very good point about styles here. When I got started I definitely gravitated toward top game due to the large proportion of training partners that emphasized guard work, etc. so getting going with passing kinda just 'made sense'.

I don't know if I am an anomaly or what but I really like playing guard and I really like passing guard. I just don't like wasting my energy on takedowns. If my opponent want's to pull guard I would be very happy or if they don't I am still happy to pull guard. In the USA almost zero white belts pull guard in my region so I am always pulling guard. In 100 matches at white belt I never had anyone pull guard on me. And in my 11 matches against blue belts in the Gi I still didn't have anyone pull guard on me. I've had one blue belt pull guard on me in no-gi. That's it in over 100 matches I've only had someone pull guard on me once and that was only because he thought I was a wrestler. I can't wait for someone to pull guard on me in the GI. I will actually be excited whenever it happens for the first time. lol I want to do a cross-collar choke pass from 1/2 guard if my knee slice attempt fails so bad. The other thing is I am always in 200 pound divisions and the likely hood of the bigger guys pulling guard is much less....

I need to move to North Carolina! It happened to me 11 times before i changed tactics. I don't know if there's really any high percentage way to stop it in Gi (i don't see one), so i now employ distance takedowns in Gi. It's not so bad NoGi but then you get those damn butt scooters.

bemused by the level of enthusiasm for guard[.........]why BJJ isn't churning out UFC champions like it once did.

I suppose I agree with you there. Doing guard can be fun in the gym but in competition if I'm in guard something is not going well. In terms of your comments about the UFC/MMA I do not train MMA and have no intention to. Pandemic conditions aside I do help my friend who is an ammy fighter with his grappling training although we pretty much stick to wrestling-style breakdowns and control as opposed to 'jiu jitsu' stuff. Recently, I was speaking with a friend of mine from the gym (via phone) and we were annoyed by how high level MMA tends to evolve toward a bit of a point-fighting style. Obviously, there are several reasons for that in terms of the techniques and tactics being much more well known/democratized to their wider scale of fighters. The most recent example of this was the Adesanya/Romero fight which was a bit of a snoozer. There was something more interesting about the days of watching MMA when I was in high school where people had a sense of a more deliberate 'Style'. That being said, having trained with some D1 & D3 wrestlers who were very good, it should be no surprise that fighters with wrestling backgrounds are most prominent in terms of high level MMA champions. Clearly, those fighters are also very good at grappling in a 'jiu jitsu' sense, I mean, Robert Whittaker nearly qualified for ADCC while a reigning UFC champion last time around, I'm sure if he came to a jiu jitsu gym it would look like an absolute slaughter compared to 'regular guys'. Anyway, I think there are a lot of reasons that 'jiu jitsu' fighters won't be the prominent background going forward but the biggest, in my opinion, is the growth of the grappling scene. If there are people out there who can make a comfortable living without getting their heads bashed in, why not? Wrestling at the international level is a short, brief chance at world/Olympic glory. Knowing how the USOC works in terms of athlete funding, etc. 'second tier' elite wrestlers can make their way in MMA nicely. Although, there are additional hurdles in terms of fighter pay even at the UFC level, it is a more broad base. Again, not a decision I would make, but a decision that can be made.

I suppose I agree with you there. Doing guard can be fun in the gym but in competition if I'm in guard something is not going well. In terms of your comments about the UFC/MMA I do not train MMA and have no intention to. Pandemic conditions aside I do help my friend who is an ammy fighter with his grappling training although we pretty much stick to wrestling-style breakdowns and control as opposed to 'jiu jitsu' stuff. Recently, I was speaking with a friend of mine from the gym (via phone) and we were annoyed by how high level MMA tends to evolve toward a bit of a point-fighting style. Obviously, there are several reasons for that in terms of the techniques and tactics being much more well known/democratized to their wider scale of fighters. The most recent example of this was the Adesanya/Romero fight which was a bit of a snoozer. There was something more interesting about the days of watching MMA when I was in high school where people had a sense of a more deliberate 'Style'. That being said, having trained with some D1 & D3 wrestlers who were very good, it should be no surprise that fighters with wrestling backgrounds are most prominent in terms of high level MMA champions. Clearly, those fighters are also very good at grappling in a 'jiu jitsu' sense, I mean, Robert Whittaker nearly qualified for ADCC while a reigning UFC champion last time around, I'm sure if he came to a jiu jitsu gym it would look like an absolute slaughter compared to 'regular guys'. Anyway, I think there are a lot of reasons that 'jiu jitsu' fighters won't be the prominent background going forward but the biggest, in my opinion, is the growth of the grappling scene. If there are people out there who can make a comfortable living without getting their heads bashed in, why not? Wrestling at the international level is a short, brief chance at world/Olympic glory. Knowing how the USOC works in terms of athlete funding, etc. 'second tier' elite wrestlers can make their way in MMA nicely. Although, there are additional hurdles in terms of fighter pay even at the UFC level, it is a more broad base. Again, not a decision I would make, but a decision that can be made.

There are many directions of hip escape, and shrimping is an example of a single direction (backwards with a frame). If you watch any high level guard player, you'll notice they're: 1. Always loaded onto a hip 2. Consistently moving & changing hip direction Hip mobility is the fundamental concept that shrimping teaches, over time. Like many things passed down, grappling contains a set of drills that everyone knows are effective, but not always why they are effective. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you'll rarely find an excellent guard passer who does not address the problem of stopping hip mobility first. If you disagree, consider why the body lock is acknowledged as one of the most powerful passing techniques among no gi grapplers. The entire body lock system addresses the main challenge of passing guard, hip mobility.

I follow your point but my experience dropping in on various clubs is that there's a disproportionate attention on shrimping drills as opposed to say granby rolls. I don't know that I've been to a representative sample of clubs but I'd be interested if your experience is the same? And if so, do you think shrimping deserves more attention?

I don’t think it’s an overemphasis on hip escapes as much as an issue of suboptimal warmups in general. Instructing people to shrimp across the mat is just a simple (an traditional) thing to do. Speaking of granbys, we also always do the granby rolling across the mat too. It’s actually decent for neck warmup, but ofc neither of these is the ideal way to drill the movements in relation to actual applications. Still, beginners need to learn to move their hips on the bottom, and the classic shrimp drill is pretty good for that at the start.