Submission Guards: Why Your Finishes Should Be Positions First

Get rid of the word submission.

I mean it. For the next five minutes while you read this, strike it from your vocabulary. Replace it with something else.

Guard.

A wrist lock isn't an attack you're trying to finish. It's a wrist lock guard—a position you're playing from. A position you can maintain, transition from, or finish when the opportunity presents itself.

That reframe changes everything.

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The Problem With "Going For" Submissions

Watch a typical roll. Someone gets an arm. They squeeze. They crank. They're "going for" the armbar.

And when it doesn't work—when their partner defends, escapes, or just survives the initial attack—they've lost their position. They're back to neutral. Or worse.

This is what happens when you treat BJJ submissions as attacks instead of positions.

The mindset of "going for" a submission creates urgency. Urgency creates rushing. Rushing creates gaps. Gaps create escapes.

But here's what I've observed after 25 years on the mats: the practitioners who finish consistently aren't the ones who attack most aggressively. They're the ones who control themselves first and influence their partner's options until the finish happens.

I can only control myself. I can only influence you. That's not a limitation—it's the operating principle.

"I gave you my wrist and you started to wrist lock me. I'm the one who has to say tap. You could say to me, 'Hey, give me $20.' I could say no. And then you could wrist lock me. If I didn't tap, that's on me—not on you. I submitted to you."

Read that again. I submitted to you. The submission isn't something you do to someone. It's something they do—they submit. Your job is to create a position so controlled, so inescapable, that submission becomes their only option.

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The Reframe: Submission as Guard

Here's how I teach it now.

Instead of saying "wrist lock," say wrist lock control or wrist lock guard or wrist lock platform.

This isn't wordplay. It's a fundamental shift in how you approach the position.

When you think "wrist lock," your brain sees an endpoint—something to achieve and then be done with. When you think "wrist lock guard," your brain sees a position—something to maintain, to hold, to work from.

You control your configuration. You influence their options. That's all you're doing.

The guard player doesn't rush to finish from closed guard. They establish position, control distance, and wait for their opponent to create openings through movement. The same principle applies to every submission position.

When you don't have a choice, it's easy. When you have choices, it's hard.

If your only option is "hold the position," you hold the position. If your options are "hold the position OR try to finish," you start making bad decisions. The constraint creates the clarity.

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What Good Looks Like vs. What Doesn't

Good submission guard: Maintain moderate tension without cranking. Your partner is controlled. They can't effectively attack you. They can't easily escape. You're in a dominant position—you just happen to be threatening their wrist while you're there.

Can you bring your legs back into guard while maintaining that same connection? Can you transition to another control position without releasing the pressure? If the answer is yes, you're playing submission guard.

Not so good: You're squeezing as hard as you can. Your whole body is committed to one outcome. If they escape the wrist, you have nothing. You can't transition because you'd have to let go. You're not in a position—you're gambling on a finish.

The difference matters under pressure.

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Submission Guards: Three Examples

Let me show you three categories to illustrate the principle. There are more—every finish can be a guard. But these demonstrate the concept.

1. Wrist Lock Guard

The wrist lock position creates control through rotational pressure. You're not trying to break anything. You're creating a configuration where:

• Your partner can't posture effectively
• Your partner can't create the angles they need to escape
• Any movement they make either submits them or improves your position

Here's what unlocks it: the wrist lock guard has defensive applications. By rotating your thumbs down in the grip, you force your partner to rotate away from you. In a self-defense or MMA context, this rotation naturally deflects strikes. You're not defending and attacking separately—the control position does both.

2. Strangle Lock Guard

This includes the positions you might call rear naked choke, guillotine, arm triangle, or any neck-based control.

Think about it: when you have a deep guillotine grip, what's your partner's mobility? Limited. Their posture? Compromised. Their offense? Neutralized.

You're in guard. You just happen to be controlling their neck.

The finish comes when their escape attempts—bridging, turning, trying to posture—create the space and angle for the choke to tighten. You don't force it. You wait. They submit themselves.

3. Leg Lock Guards

The same principle applies to every leg entanglement. Each configuration is its own guard—its own platform of control:

• Ankle lock guard — straight ankle control as a position
• Inside heel hook guard — inside ashi configuration as a position
• Outside heel hook guard — outside ashi configuration as a position
• Toe hold guard — toe hold control as a position
• Knee bar guard — knee bar configuration as a position
• Estima lock guard — Estima lock configuration as a position
• Aoki lock guard — Aoki lock configuration as a position
• Samuelson shin trap guard — control above the ankle, creating restrictions through the entire foot-ankle-knee complex

You're not "going for" a heel hook. You're playing inside heel hook guard. You're not "attacking" the ankle. You're in ankle lock platform—a position you can hold, transition from, or finish when your partner creates the opening.

The practitioner who understands this doesn't chase leg locks. They establish the control position and wait. You control yourself. You influence their options. That's the difference.

Important caveat: Research shows that upper-body BJJ submissions correlate strongly with positional dominance, but leg attacks operate differently—they can succeed without traditional positional control. Leg lock guards are still about control, but the control looks different than mount or back control.

Here's what I'll tell you that others won't: most failed leg locks—the ones that end with your guard passed, back taken, or getting submitted yourself—come from the person attacking while on bottom, or a combination of bottom and side. Compared to attacks from side, top, or a combination of those.

This ties back to the fundamental hierarchy from Jiu-Jitsu Is Easy: top is winning, bottom is losing, away or on your side might be okay. When you're on bottom, you have less control of yourself—which is the whole premise of submission guards. Leg lock guards work. But the position you're in when you enter them still matters.

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Why Variable Grips Change Everything

Here's the advanced insight:

"Once you get to some of these variable grips and you get some of that set up, every other leg configuration or your body configuration becomes so variable that if your partner doesn't know what they're doing, more often than not, they're just going to kind of submit themselves or hurt themselves."

When you have the grip—when you're in submission guard—your body can be anywhere. Your legs can reconfigure freely. Your angle can adjust. You control yourself completely.

But your partner? Every movement they make has consequences. They're in a maze where most doors lead to the same place: submission. You're influencing them completely.

This is control vs. influence in action. You control yourself. You influence them. You know what happens if they move. They don't. Every adjustment they make to escape either gives you something better or finishes them.

The person who chases submissions is in a fair fight—both people are trying to win the same exchange. The person who plays submission guard has already won. Their partner just doesn't know it yet.

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The Connection to Position Before Submission

If you've read Jiu-Jitsu Is Easy, you know the fundamental hierarchy: top is winning, bottom is losing, away or on your side might be okay.

The Three Things Framework says that from any position, only three things can happen. But here's what that framework implies:

Submission guard could be a top position. It could be a side position. Rarely, but still possible, it could even be a bottom position—like getting caught in an Ezekiel choke from the bottom of mount.

The position name doesn't matter. What matters is this: you only have control of yourself. You're influencing them.

When you have a deep guillotine, are you "on top" or "on bottom"? Wrong question. You're in a configuration where you control yourself and you're influencing their options. Their mobility is limited. Their posture is compromised. Their offense is neutralized.

This connects to what I wrote about in Playing Guard on Top: position isn't about where your body is. It's about the mechanical relationship. Who's compact? Who's extended? Who controls distance?

In submission guard, you control yourself completely. You influence them completely. That's what makes it dominant—regardless of where your torso happens to be.

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The Constraints That Create This

The research backs this up. The constraints-led method I discussed in The 5-Grip Challenge applies directly here.

When you limit yourself to "submission guard" instead of "submission," you create a constraint. That constraint forces different behavior:

• You stop rushing to finish
• You start noticing transition opportunities
• You develop the patience to wait for submissions instead of forcing them
• You learn what positions actually feel like, not just what they look like

Research confirms what coaches have known intuitively: skill acquisition accelerates when you limit options, not expand them. Treating every submission as a guard position is a constraint that changes how you learn to finish.

Competition data supports this too. Analysis of elite no-gi BJJ found that positional dominance duration was significantly different between winners and losers, and positional dominance correlated with upper-body submission success (r = 0.50). Position enables the finish.

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Practical Application

Here's how to train this week.

Pick one submission you're comfortable with. Armbar, triangle, kimura—doesn't matter. Now relabel it.

It's not an armbar. It's armbar guard.

Your job for the next week isn't to finish armbars. It's to get to and maintain armbar guard. Can you stay there? Can you control from there? Can you transition from there without losing pressure?

The finishes will come. But they'll come as a byproduct of position, not as a goal you're chasing.

This is the Am I Safe? question applied to offense: before asking "can I finish this?", ask "am I in a position of control?"

If the answer is no—or if you have to think about it—the answer is no. Establish position first. The submission will find you.

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Bob's Story: The Cost of Willingness to Fail

Let me tell you about Bob.

Bob came to me as an adult practitioner. Not a competitive kid with decades ahead of him. Someone who started later and had to be smart about how he trained.

His first competition was World Masters. Not locals. Not a small tournament to get his feet wet. The biggest stage for his age division.

He lost.

Then he did No-Gi Worlds. Lost again.

Most people would have stopped. Scaled back. Found smaller tournaments to "build confidence." Bob didn't.

He kept competing at the highest level. American Nationals 2025—won. Master Worlds—third place. No-Gi Worlds—second place. Multiple IBJJF tournaments along the way.

Here's what I want you to understand about that: Bob was willing to fail at the highest level to get better. He didn't need to prove he was ready. He didn't need to win small tournaments first. He accepted that he might get destroyed—and competed anyway.

That willingness to fail is what separates people who actually improve from people who just train.

"You're willing to fail to get better. So regardless if you're training jiu-jitsu or grappling or weightlifting and you're failing, even if you kind of get in your head, just remember you're doing more than many other people out there and you're going to end up better for it."

The submission guard approach requires the same willingness. You have to accept that you'll lose positions while you're learning to hold them. You'll miss finishes while you're learning to wait for them. You'll feel less effective in the short term while you build something more effective in the long term.

That's the cost. But the practitioners who pay it—who treat submissions as guards, who establish before they attack, who are willing to fail at a higher level—they're the ones who finish consistently when it matters.

We never lose the same way twice. Bob didn't. You don't have to either.

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Submissions are positions. Guards. Platforms. Control configurations.

If "guard" doesn't work for you, use "platform." Use "control." Use whatever word helps you see it differently. The word matters less than the shift.

When you see them that way, the rushing stops. The forcing stops. The frantic energy that telegraphs your attacks and creates openings for escapes—that stops.

What's left is control. Patience. The quiet confidence of someone who knows the outcome is already determined, even if their partner hasn't submitted yet.

The sooner you look at it through this scope, the sooner your whole approach to the word "submission" adjusts.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I submitted to you. That's what it means to finish. You don't force submission. You create the position that makes submission inevitable.

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I'm teaching you how to beat me. Ready to start? Book a session or train with me in New Jersey.

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Related: This article builds on the positional hierarchy introduced in Jiu-Jitsu Is Easy and the guard mechanics explored in Playing Guard on Top. For constraint-based training methods that complement this approach, see The 5-Grip Challenge. For the foundational question that applies to both offense and defense, see Am I Safe?. To understand how these principles remain constant whether you're training in a gi or without one, see Gi vs No-Gi.

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Sources

• Spanias, C., Kirk, C., & Øvretveit, K. (2022). Position before submission? Techniques and tactics in competitive no-gi Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Revista de Artes Marciales Asiáticas, 17(2), 130-139. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/31193/

• Chua, L-K., Jiménez-Díaz, J., Lewthwaite, R., Kim, T., & Wulf, G. (2021). Superiority of external attentional focus for motor performance and learning: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 147(6), 618-645. DOI: 10.1037/bul0000335

• Davids, K., Araújo, D., Vilar, L., Renshaw, I., & Pinder, R. (2013). An Ecological Dynamics Approach to Skill Acquisition: Implications for Development of Talent in Sport. Talent Development and Excellence, 5(1), 21-34.

• Chen, Y., et al. (2022). A comparison of perceptual anticipation in combat sports between experts and non-experts: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 961960. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.961960

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George Samuelson is a second-degree black belt under Dante Rivera and Ricardo Almeida (lineage: Renzo Gracie). Known as "Dante Rivera's First Black Belt," he has coached IBJJF World medalists, UFC fighters, and practitioners at every level. He has promoted two black belts himself, including a world champion. George teaches at Ocean County BJJ in Forked River, NJ and Dante Rivera BJJ in Howell, NJ.