Angles
Angles enhance leverage, reduce your opponent's strength, and create opportunities for attacks and escapes. Whether you're applying submissions, passing guard, or defending, proper angles allow you to control the fight with technique rather than strength. Mastering angles will make your grappling smoother, more efficient, and much harder to counter.
Why Angles Are Important
Leverage
- Angles allow you to generate more leverage, making techniques more effective with less effort.
Examples
- Triangle choke
- Creating a perpendicular angle to your opponent increases the pressure on their neck.
- Armbar
- Pivoting your hips and creating an angle isolates the arm and makes it harder for them to resist.
The right angle amplifies your strength by maximizing leverage, reducing the need for brute force.
Neutralizing Strength
- Angling yourself properly helps you avoid facing your opponent's full strength and redirects their force.
Examples
- Guard retention
- Moving your hips and angling away makes it harder for your opponent to smash pass.
- Side control escapes
- Shrimping at an angle prevents them from driving straight pressure into you.
Good angles turn a stronger opponent's power into wasted effort.
Creating Opportunities for Attacks
- Angles expose openings for sweeps, submissions, and transitions that aren’t available head-on.
Escaping Dominant Positions
- Escapes often depend on creating angles to make space and free yourself from control.
Breaking Posture and Balance
- Changing angles destabilizes your opponent, making them easier to sweep or control.
Examples
- Scissor sweep
- Pulling at an angle breaks their posture and shifts their balance, making the sweep effective.
- Collar drag
- Dragging them diagonally creates off-balance momentum for a takedown or back take.
Angles allow you to break their base and make them easier to move or manipulate.
Defending Attacks
- Changing angles neutralizes your opponent’s offensive attacks by reducing their ability to apply force effectively.
Examples
- Defending an armbar
- Turning your arm and angling your body reduces their leverage and pressure.
- Defending chokes
- Rotating to a side angle creates space between your neck and their Grips Overview.
A slight angle shift can disrupt their mechanics, breaking their submission attempt.
Guard Passing
- Using angles during guard passing lets you bypass your opponent’s legs and break through their defenses.
Examples
- Torreando pass
- Moving at an angle avoids their guard recovery and allows a clean transition to side control.
- Over-under pass
- Dropping your hips at the right angle breaks their frames and pins them effectively.
Passing guard straight-on is difficult; angles let you work around their defenses.
Dominating Top Control
- Controlling your opponent from top positions often requires angling your body to apply pressure and maintain stability.
Examples
- Side control
- Angling your hips and chest into them prevents escapes and allows for better submission setups.
- Mount
- Shifting your angle to attack isolates limbs and forces defensive reactions.
Adjusting your angle lets you maintain control and set up your next move.
Improved Mobility
- Working from angles makes your movement smoother and more efficient, conserving energy and reducing resistance.
Examples
- Guard transitions
- Using angles lets you move fluidly between attacks like arm drags, sweeps, and submissions.
- Escaping pins
- Angling your body creates natural movement paths for escapes.
Angles help you move smarter, not harder, during transitions and escapes.
How to Develop Strong Angling in BJJ
Focus on hips and shoulders
- Proper hip movement and shoulder alignment are key to creating angles.
Combine angles with Grips Overview
- Use grip fighting to adjust your opponent’s posture and open up better angles.
Study positional awareness
- Understand where your opponent is vulnerable and how angling your body can exploit those weaknesses.
Incorporate live rolling
- Work on dynamically creating angles during scrambles and positional battles.