Most people don't have 3 hours a day to train, most people only show up a couple of times a week, with limited time I should make the best of the situation.
If time is really such a crunch you probably shouldn't be teaching them to mess around with submissions from bottom at all; have them practice technical stand ups then move on to more important things, like kuzushi.
Shooting a triangle is way more important as a white belt That getting anything else. Imo the tirangle is the only reliable attack from guard in a sd scenario, white belts should still have that. In mind.
Is it, really? i think that's very arguable. There's no shortage of people successfully using leg entanglements in 'social combat' even with their relative obscurity, and it's disproportionate success in dedicated competition speaks for itself; it is a highly instinctual and natural progression to attack the legs first when on bottom.
White belts need to learn how to pass stay on top mount sub, escape side control and other more basic stuff,
I agree completely.
they do not have that many hours to drill all that plus leg entanglements.
But they
do have time for even
more marginal bottom fighting strategies? There's that cognitive dissonance again.
And it's worth for shit anything we drill in if they are only going to start looking for leg attacks as soon as the roll starts.
I think, like my implication in the other post, that this is a problem with the structure of curriculum as much as anything else.
For example, if you were to go to a hypothetical highschool around here and watch a folkstyle practice while the kids are doing timed goes, you'll probably see that they're not just faffing about aimlessly, but that there are specific situations they keep trying to get to. Why? Because
they are mentally keeping score. Score of what?
The ruleset they compete under.
The problem with free rolling in many bjj gyms is that the 'mental tallies' people use to keep track of how well they are doing in a roll are based on either sub only or ibjjf rules.
Why is this a problem?
Because ibjjf rules reward you for being on bottom.
People respond to incentives; that people, in a free rolling environment, chose to voluntarily and disproportionately forgo top even when gifted it in favor of going for the legs speaks to the disproportionate effectiveness of leglocks in that particular metagame.
If you want your students, unsupervised, outside of positional rolls and drills, to actually and actively seek top, you'd need to change that culture
surrounding the roll; you'd need different
rulesets people would default to in absence of further direction for mentally tracking how well they are doing in a roll. One way you might do this is by holding bimonthly in-house or open mat tournaments with your own ruleset geared towards rewarding grappling habits you find most valuable.
One thing is for sure though: banning techniques because they are so
effective is the
opposite of excellence and liveness in martial arts; it's the path to mcdojos and kata bunnies.
Leglocks are a power source amongst the wider grappling universe, and power sources don't actually go away if you demand them to go away; what happens is that the good kids who follow the rules and listen to their leader and observe the traditions are now power-less against those outcaste ne'er-do-wells who
do use the power source, in spite of sanctions otherwise. If you deliver a message, in so many words by so many means, that good guys don't seek power and only bad guys do, naturally, you'll guarantee the fulfillment of your prophecy.
