The best technique for improving your ground game?

[ice & cortisone]

What is the single best drill/activity that you folks have done that has made the biggest improvement in your grappling other than rolling?

If you're new, it seems as though rolling can create as many bad habits as good ones.

 

[Soulfly]

Hip escape drills. Forewords and backwards. They're useful in EVERY situation when it comes to grappling.

I like to do foreword, backward, and sideways rolls before I train sometimes. Kind of gets me pumped and in the right mindset.

And if you're doing takedowns with your training (and you should), you should practice ukemi or breakfalling often.

 

[Mark Limbaga]

drills.

 

[flyingknee16]

Drilling bread and butter techniques over and over again until you've mastered their motion and mechanics.

 

[Spoonman7]

lots of movement drills, movement is key to groundwork, monkey rolls, granby rolls, sit outs, hip hiests, switches they all will help you.

 

[SmashiusClay]

Arm bar from guard, do it at the start of each session as part of your warm up and then again at the end. I use 2 each side alternating. It's, imo, the most useful sub you have and one of the best ways to learn proper movement and hip control.

 

[Ouch That Hurt]

Guard retention using a slow roll. Just practicing all the hip movements, step overs, spins and whatnot. But going at 25% at the most so you get the feel how it works. My open guard game jumped like 10 times what it was in a few weeks. Then in actual rolling I tried stuff and figured out what I was capable of doing over the weeks.

 

[ichimonji]

best drill would be practicing passing the guard at 50 % strength and 50 % speed. In grappling if you can pass the guard you can practice pins and subs ... if you can't even pass a good guard .. you are always defending sweeps and subs.