UFC 107 Preview: Bloody Elbow Judo Chop: The Lethal Rear-Naked Choke Set Ups of B.J. Penn

My two cents:

The first thing everyone has to know about the RNC or for that matter essentially any chokes from the back (collar, bow and arrow, etc etc) is that there’s one objective to have if you’re the guy who’s getting attacked and that objective is:

Stop the attacking arm. There’s only one arm you need to worry about, the reason some guys are better at getting RNCs than others (see: Marcelo Garcia (RNC master)) is that they’re amazing at switching which arm they are attacking with and can shut down their opponents defense by essentially faking them out or removing the defensive barriers.

The movement from Penn while he’s on peoples backs is pretty much all smoke and mirrors, he draws their attention in many different directions at the same time and tries to cloud the main issue at hand. The kicks to the body, the grip/hand play, the position shifts and control changes etc etc are all just to get the opponent to stop being able to concentrate on determining which hand to defend against at the time of attack; all of the opponents know the choke is his objective but because of Penn drawing their attention to other areas at the same time the opponent thinks they see an opening or believes they have the right arm under control when they so obviously don’t (thus they get trapped and then tapped, or straight tapped).

Penn’s also pretty devious, in the Pulver choke he’s both setting up an armbar and a choke at the same time. That underhook from the back which shuts down Pulvers free arm is the start to achieving a little slipping arm bar from the back, Pulver bridges up to try and rotate into Penn’s guard but because he forgets the choke for a second he misses the fact that Penn had moved his forearm underneath Pulvers chin, the forearm pops straight up, the underhook dissapears and then bam… fade to black.

Now on Kenny there’s a little tiny thing that’s really interesting. Kenny is try to trap B.J.s leg and turn into a half guard or he’ll try to turtle up, Penn dangles that bottom leg inside as a bait for Kenny and then because of his ridiculous dexterity he actually uses his foot to stop Kenny from hipping over into Penn’s half guard or from turtling up. Once the kicks on the open leg free up the route to the choke Penn goes ahead and hits the full mata leo style RNC (which is what he almost always does, many MMA fighters use the 10 fingers or gable grip style choke from the back).

The crazy thing to me is how good Penn is with back control when he has his own back flat on the mat with the opponents weight down on him, he’s just as fluid there as he is on the side (small tip: executing the choke with you on your side and opponent on their side is more effective than having their weight on you because you can dig your hooks in and arch your back while breathing in (makes the choke much more effective) with their weight on you it’s harder to do that, so look for Penn to always try to finish the choke while both he and the opponent lay on their side (which is pretty much how they all end, but thought I’d add that in.)

The RNC and back control in general are ingrained in lighter weight jiu jitsu practitioners faster than the heavier weight classes because of the training dynamic, it’s much harder for me (6’4, 206ibs) to fight a smaller opponent when he is on my back because I can’t use my size, strength, length, or leverage to defend myself as easily as I could if he was in my guard, half guard, etc etc; by maintaining control on the back he’s allowed to execute offense while being safe and not having to defend against the larger opponent strength and technique at the same time. So smaller, quicker guys tend to gravitate towards back control because it gives them the best chances at executing an offensive gameplan. Now in mma and non-absolute grappling matches they’ll tend to broaden out their gameplan but because they’ve had to draw up and make routes to back control because of their training “in house” they’ll still be looking for it a lot and be more comfortable executing from that dominant position.

If I can think of anything else to add later, I will, other than that I kinda just brain drained a little jiu jitsu out of my head haha hope some of this post made sense?