Gordon Ryan recently shared some crucial insights on maximizing effectiveness from the closed guard position. His approach focuses on creating movement and angles—two essential elements that many practitioners overlook.
According to Ryan, the closed guard requires two fundamental components to be effective: movement and angle. While many practitioners rely on body triangles for control, Ryan suggests that this technique can actually limit mobility and angle creation.
“When you’re in a closed guard, there are two things I need from here. I need movement and angle,”
Ryan explains. He prefers using crossed ankles rather than more restrictive configurations, allowing him to work more dynamically from the position.
The key insight Ryan emphasizes is leveraging your knees rather than relying solely on upper body strength. He points out a common mistake among practitioners:
“What everyone tries to do is I try to use the hands where it’s my upper body versus my partner’s upper body. What I have to do is I have to use my knees in conjunction with hand fighting and palm bling to actually get anything to work from here.”
Ryan stresses that every move from closed guard should begin with a knee pull. This approach provides the necessary leverage to control your opponent’s posture and create offensive opportunities.
Ryan demonstrates that trying to pull an opponent down using only arm strength is ineffective and easily countered. Instead, he advocates for coordinating knee pulls with upper body techniques:
“If I just try to pull my partner’s hands across, he just postures and he’s out and away. But if I use my knees to pull him in, when he goes to posture, we can use the knee pull to guide him across.”
This combined approach keeps the opponent’s posture broken, preventing them from standing up and opening your guard. Once posture is controlled, practitioners can focus on creating movement and angles for attacks.
By implementing proper knee pulls and angle creation, Ryan explains in a video that practitioners open pathways to numerous attacks:
“Now from here we can go into back takes. We can go into pendulum sweeps. We can go into flower sweeps. We can go into arm bars from here.”
The versatility of this approach allows for seamless transitions between different offensive options based on how the opponent reacts.
Ryan also highlights the effectiveness of alternating between pushing and pulling motions with the knees:
“I can push my partner away from here. I can threaten pushing my partner away. And then now from here, the second he goes to goes to come forward towards me, I can pull everything in towards me.”
This push-pull dynamic creates reaction-based opportunities that can be exploited for successful attacks.
Gordon Ryan‘s closed guard philosophy centers on using the legs as primary tools for creating movement and angles, rather than relying solely on upper body strength. By focusing on knee pulls in coordination with hand fighting, practitioners can maintain broken posture, create angles, and execute a variety of effective attacks from the closed guard position.
