Conceptual foundations + core principles + foundational skills + learning guide. Transcribed verbatim from the video by Brian Glick (Danaher system).

developingUpdated 2026-04-18

Source metadata (from the original transcript):

title: "Defense and Escapes to Turtle Position and Front Headlock — Volume 01"

source: Video instructional transcript

system: Danaher system (dedicated to Mr. John Danaher)

runtime: ~1h 15m

format: Conceptual foundations + core principles + foundational skills + learning guide

Defense and Escapes to Turtle Position and Front Headlock

Volume 01 — Conceptual Foundations & Core Skills

Scope of this document. This is a faithful, cleaned, and restructured transcript of the instructional video. All teaching content is preserved — no paraphrasing or compression. Speech-to-text artifacts have been corrected (e.g., "Dan and her" → "Danaher", "Kazushi/Kizushi" → "Kuzushi", "darses" → "D'Arces"), mid-sentence timestamp breaks have been repaired into flowing prose, and the material has been reorganized into a navigable hierarchy. Section-start timestamps are retained as anchors to the original video.

Dedication to Mr. Danaher
Introduction: Why This Material Matters
Position Overview: Front Headlock
Position Overview: Turtle
Core Principles
Foundational Skill 1 — Grip Fighting
- 6.1 Primary vs. secondary defensive hand
- 6.2 End of the lever
- 6.3 Hands on top
- 6.4 Glue your partner's hands to your body
- 6.5 Applied to front headlock and turtle
- 6.6 A progressive drill sequence
Foundational Skill 2 — The Elbow Cut
- 7.1 Elbow cut in front headlock — don't let your elbow cross centerline
- 7.2 Elbow cut in turtle — get the elbow to the floor
Foundational Skill 3 — The Shoulder Roll
Foundational Skill 4 — Standing Up
How to Use This Video — A Learning Protocol

1. Dedication to Mr. Danaher

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As with all of the other videos I've done, I'd like to dedicate this video to my instructor, Mr. John Danaher. Without him, none of this would be possible — not only the material itself, but the life I have in jiu-jitsu: the fact that I've been able to practice and train this long, the fact that I've been able to continue to develop, grow, and evolve as a student, is really due to his guidance and his oversight.

Whenever you have a mentor or an instructor who's really watching out for you — not just in a simplistic, superficial way, but in a deep, really dedicated, committed way — it's very inspiring, it's very motivating, and it does bring out the best in you. So if you're lucky enough to have someone like that, you really have struck gold. That's certainly how I feel.

We hope you enjoy this video. Thanks so much.

2. Introduction: Why This Material Matters

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Welcome to this video on defense and escapes to turtle position and front headlock.

2.1 The problem: turtle and front headlock aren't pins, but feel like them

A lot of the time, when people begin to understand how they work defense, their primary exposure is to pin defenses. In a previous video we covered a lot about how you can use fundamentals like the elbow escape, bridging, and pendulum methods to escape a bottom pin.

What's interesting about turtle and front headlock is that they're not strictly pins, so they don't fall into the same category as pin escapes. However, because your partner's hands are so close to your neck, and you're so close to being strangled, it feels in many ways like a pin. This video is dedicated to:

Understanding, first of all, how front headlock and turtle work, so you can begin to reverse-engineer and diagnose what's going on in your training, and become more comfortable with escapes and ultimately counters.
Giving you some primary things to be thinking about when you're in these two positions.

Another major challenge with turtle and front headlock is that — because the sort of connection your partner has to you is a little different from the major pins — there's often a sense of lack of control and scramble coming out of these positions. Because of that, regardless of whether you're just beginning, or intermediate, or have been training for a long time, it can be difficult to diagnose exactly what the problem is and how you're supposed to go about solving it.

For me personally, front headlock and turtle were primarily static positions when I first began to learn them. Mr. Danaher developed a more comprehensive way of approaching turtle and front headlock over the course of a number of years, so my understanding and how I worked with those positions changed a lot as well.

Our goal for you is: first, to understand the position; then to simplify what your partner is doing; then to simplify your responses, so that you have not just a good chance of escaping or recovering, but an actual directed method. That was my own personal evolution: I went from a place of just surviving, to understanding what my partner was trying to do, to becoming confident and creating almost a system around how I deal with front headlock and turtle.

2.2 The "matrix of three positions" goal

The broader goal is for you to have a sense of almost a matrix of three different positions that you can move through with confidence. When you're stuck in one of them, you can create Kuzushi (off-balance) on your partner, make it more difficult for them to grip you and follow you. You'll develop a sense of transitioning so that, for instance, if you're in front headlock and your partner runs around to turtle position, you're not totally lost and thinking of it as a completely separate position. There are through-lines that allow us to connect one to the other. And, ultimately, also relating that to the back position — because back, turtle, and front headlock all share the property that your partner is attacking you chest-to-back.

The dynamic pins that most instructors spend time on are really chest-to-chest pins — mount, north-south, side control, those sorts of things. We covered those in a previous video. But the nature of turtle, front headlock, and back is different from those. So our goal is for you to have a holistic approach, a matrix, to these positions — so you feel comfortable not just in defense and escape, but ultimately in countering.

2.3 What you should take away from this video

The primacy of gripping.
Posture and body positioning — how your body needs to be positioned to give you the optimal results for escaping, countering, and recovering to positions you're more comfortable with.
The major goals when you're stuck at the bottom of front headlock or turtle, and the best methods and ways out.

Next, we'll go into some of the major concepts that govern these three positions, and then some of the essential skills you need in order to move fluidly through them with confidence — knowing where you're going, where you're coming from, and what you need to be paying attention to.

3. Position Overview: Front Headlock

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Let's go through an overview of both turtle position and front headlock so we can understand what makes them similar, what makes them different, and what the goals are for each.

Front headlock is a situation where we have our partner's head wrapped up — the same way you would for guillotine-style attacks — and our second hand is usually behind our partner's arm. Your hands in this can be:

Open hands — e.g. holding your partner's chin and their bicep.
Locked hands — can be locked on the outside, on the inside, palm-to-palm / wrist-to-wrist; it doesn't really matter.

3.1 What the top person is trying to do

When we're the top person in front headlock, the goal is usually to create separation between our partner's elbow and their knee — we're "starving" our partner's arm to open up this space. That does two things:

Path to the back. One goal is to insert a knee as a wedge and move around behind our partner to expose the back. Sometimes people will run around with minimal wedges to get to the back and begin attacking turtle position.

Rolling them through. Alternatively, we separate the elbow from the knee in order to create a roll — get the head underneath and start to roll our partner through, putting them into a position where we can begin to attack.

So, summarized:

Go behind — expose the back and run around behind.
Stay in front — either roll or strangle. From a jiu-jitsu perspective, if we're staying in front, we're probably going to look to establish strangles, guillotines, D'Arces, and anacondas.

3.2 The essential dilemma on the bottom

This gives us the first and most important dilemma when you're on the bottom of front headlock (and by extension turtle): the dilemma between your partner going behind you and your partner staying in front and strangling.

Understanding this dilemma is key. It allows you to focus on exactly what's happening, and to read your partner's reactions a little better. When you're underneath, the two things you're really focused on are:

Is he staying in front, looking to threaten strangles?
Is his goal to run around behind me?

Once you can diagnose what your partner is trying to do, that gives you a sense of what you need to do in order to defend.

3.3 Grip-fighting priorities on the bottom

When we're working from front headlock bottom, we have grip fighting as a primary goal — and this is the same for front headlock, turtle, and the back. We're looking to defend our partner's grips.

If your partner has open hands: you're usually working for inside position. (We'll cover this in detail when we get into gripping specifics.) You're looking to get your hands inside — to cover his knuckles, create separation, or pin a wrist and create space to move around to the outside.
If your partner's hands are locked: you're usually looking to either separate the locked hands, if possible, or to elongate your partner's arms in order to make space, so you can circle yourself out and free your head. Then you can have your own attacks to follow up.

So when you're underneath front headlock you really have two things to think about:

The dilemma between your partner staying in front (strangling) vs. going behind.
The primary objective of separating your partner's hands / winning the grip fight.

3.4 Two families of escape: wrestling-style vs. jiu-jitsu-style

When your partner is looking to grip, there are two basic options:

Stay on your knees — for instance, circling your head out while staying down on your knees. Or stand up out of this position (lift your knees off the mat) and do your work from there.
Put your back on the floor.

The split is really between wrestling-style escapes — where we stay on our knees, or tripod up and stand, or walk around behind our partner — and jiu-jitsu-style escapes, which usually involve exposing our back to the floor.

If you have a lot of wrestling experience and you're more comfortable staying on your knees with your belly facing the floor, you're going to favor the wrestling-style escapes. If you're a jiu-jitsu practitioner, you'll likely be much more comfortable with things like rolling escapes or sitting escapes where you expose your back to the floor.

This is a great thing, because — unlike in wrestling — in jiu-jitsu you're always worried about the threat of the strangle, and one of the best ways to mitigate the strangle is to get your back to the mat. When you can get your back to the floor, you take away a lot of the power your partner has from front-headlock positions.

It's not that easy, of course, which is why we need some technical elements. But generally: if from a front-headlock situation I can put my back on the floor safely, then when my partner goes to strangle, it's very difficult for him to even keep the grip. As we're going to see, it's not always easy for them to prevent us from creating opportunities to come up to the legs, roll our partner through, or otherwise negate the grip they have around our neck.

Quick recap of the turtle/front-headlock picture so far:

Partner can stay in front and strangle or go behind; we need to read intention.
Our primary objective is managing our partner's grips. Even when we can't separate the hands, we're always looking for inside position. Per Mr. Danaher: maximize your results rather than being satisfied with a basic result (don't just separate and return to neutral — look to attack). And remember defensive responsibility — before you worry about getting out or improving position, take care of your neck. If you're being strangled, all bets are off.
Two styles of escape: wrestling-style (stay on knees or come up to feet) and jiu-jitsu-style (put your back on the floor, e.g., sitting to guard, rolling to guard, rolling into your partner's legs, rolling back to half-guard, etc.). You need to be versed in both, but may prefer one. This video will focus primarily on jiu-jitsu-style escapes.

In the course of our work, we'll develop a technical set of goals, a toolset, and then tactical methods to diagnose what's going on and get the best outcome you can from front headlock.

4. Position Overview: Turtle

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Now let's take a look at the overview and goals for the turtle position when we're the defensive person. If we first understand the goals of the top person, it'll help us understand ours on the bottom.

4.1 What the top person is trying to do

When we're in turtle position on top, we're usually looking to do a couple of things.

1. Win a hand battle to control the partner's upper body. There are a number of ways:

Win the battle for inside position (under the partner's chin and seat-belt).
Win the battle for wrist control.
Lock your hands underneath your partner's armpits.
Lock your hands down by your partner's waist (body lock).

2. Establish a leg position.

On the outside — maybe one knee down, one leg up.
Two knees on the outside, one on either side of the hips ("cowboy ride" style).
Put hooks in — a near-side hook, or a far-side hook.
Best of all: both hooks in and winning the upper-body battle.

3. Break your partner down to a less athletic position. When we're on the bottom, if elbows and knees are on the floor, you can actually be more athletic than your partner — build height, create space, create off-balance action. So on top, I'm looking to break him down onto a hip, or an elbow / shoulder. If I can break my partner down to a hip and an elbow, I now have the ability to start gaining inside position with my arms, putting my hooks inside, and so on.

4.2 What we want on the bottom

We basically want the opposite of what our partner wants.

Win the hand-fighting battle. Maintain defensive responsibility, where our primary defensive hand (covered in detail in §6) is ready to receive our partner's arm. Whenever possible, separate our partner's hands and create a sense of disconnection — the opposite of the connection he wants. If we separate the hands, our partner's ability to dominate or create ideal opportunities is greatly reduced. Now we can sit back to guard, expose our back to the floor, enter our partner's legs, come up on top — all of these things.

Win the hip-separation battle. Turtle is technically classified as a neutral position (it's not a pin), but when you're on the bottom it rarely feels that way — because your partner is so close to putting hooks inside, so close to strangles, and can move around at will. So there has to be something else we're doing from here.

4.3 Kuzushi and misdirection: the turtle's specific problem

The two big things we're trying to do on the bottom are create Kuzushi (off-balance) on our partner and create misdirection, so we can get to our goals — separating hands, separating hips.

Examples of off-balancing:

Bumping backward into them, to create a sense of separation, then taking advantage of the fact that they're out of balance.
If his hands are locked, bumping forward, again creating separation.

Important about Kuzushi: off-balancing is a temporary state of affairs. By its nature, you're creating an imbalance and taking away your partner's natural equilibrium — and they're always looking to get it back. When you bump somebody forward, you have to expect that they're going to recover. It's in the gap between your off-balance and your partner's recovery that a lot of the techniques we're going to be covering from turtle come into play.

So, from the bottom:

Kuzushi and misdirection.
Separation of hips.
Separation of hands.
And out of that, the goal of putting our back on the floor or creating distance so we can regard.

What we want, ultimately, is to chain our understanding of how to defend front headlock and escape, how to defend turtle and escape, how to defend the back and escape/counter. All of these tools serve one major goal: getting ourselves to a place where we can become proactive again, engage with our partner on our terms, and go back on the offensive.

5. Core Principles

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Now let's get into some concepts and principles behind what we're trying to do when it comes to turtle and front headlock.

5.1 Principle 1 — Get your back on the floor

I mentioned it before, but the idea of putting your back on the floor is a very jiu-jitsu approach to managing this problem. When it comes to integrating your defense from front headlock and turtle with the rest of your jiu-jitsu, one of the best things you can learn is to put your back on the floor whenever you're facing someone in front headlock and turtle position.

The reason is simple: we would always much rather have someone in a top pin — believe it or not — or facing our frames than having chest-to-back contact. There's just so much risk of strangle, improved position, and pressure whenever someone is floating around off to the side in turtle, or in front of you in front headlock.

So a big part of what we'll do involves getting your back to the floor. The idea is that, even if you're in a situation where you're not yet sure of the technical means to accomplish your goal, you still have this idea in mind: if you're in trouble, getting your back to the floor is usually a good idea. Even if your guard is not amazing, even if you end up in something like a cradle (which we'll talk about shortly), it's still a better position in so many ways than front headlock or turtle.

Caveat: There are some positions where if you just try to put your back on the floor, you're leaving your neck vulnerable or leaving yourself susceptible to other attacks. So we do want this principle partnered with grip fighting (next section).

But generally speaking — if he's in front headlock and I can manage to get my back to the floor even if he doesn't unlock his hands, even if he keeps his grips — once my back is on the mat, my ability to create Kuzushi and off-balance is greatly improved.

Even if I go to step up and he switches to a cradle position, locking his hands, when I move from that position to one where my back (or in that case, my side) is on the ground, we're able to:

Create space between ourselves and our partner.
Use our arm as a frame.
Use our leg to form a connection.
Extend our head and take it away from our partner.

All of those things become available once you're on the ground. That's one method (sitting back). Another is rolling — he's in front headlock, I separate his hands, switch from him being in front to being on the side, and we put our back on the floor via a rolling method. That's also a good way of doing it.

[!PRINCIPLE] Back to the floor When in doubt, get your back to the floor. It forms a through-line to the rest of your jiu-jitsu — half guard, closed guard, butterfly guard — whichever you prefer to play. Even before you know the specific technique, this gives you a general sense of direction when things go wrong.

5.2 Principle 2 — Fight for inside position

Inside position is such an important overriding principle in all of the things we do. When I first began training with Mr. Danaher, this was one of those things that was drilled into me from the very beginning: if you can get to inside position, you have a great opportunity to keep your partner's arms separated, to insert wedges, and to dominate from the inside.

This ties back to concepts from our previous material, like the clamp — being able to dominate the space between your partner's two arms by putting your knee to the inside and your hand to the inside.

Inside position begins on a micro level, and that micro level happens with grip fighting. Same as when your partner is on your back: you're looking for inside position, usually with your thumb.

In front headlock (locked hands): we're usually looking to get our hands inside our partner's wrists — so my thumb can go inside his wrist. Even if his hands are locked, if my thumb can go inside, we can now:

Separate our partner's hands from our chest.
Begin the process of separating the hands from one another.
Move around from inside position to outside, and then reclaim our own inside position in a more dominant fashion.

So keeping in mind that inside position — even at a micro level based on grip fighting — is critical.

When reclaiming guard, the focus is often again inside position. Example: creating a frame — often, when looking to separate ourselves from our partner, we claim inside position using this frame (right arm across the body). The frame then allows us to:

Create inside position with our legs.
Create separation.
Take inside position with the thumb.
Go from defensive to offensive.

In turtle: when he has hands locked in a seat-belt position, we're looking to take our hand inside. Start with the smallest possible gain — thumb inside the wrist. From there, use the second hand to take our four fingers to the inside. Another form: getting inside our partner's legs — swisher out, pass our leg through, and now we have a form of inside position with our left leg.

When you gain inside position on your partner's upper or lower body, it immediately slows down their ability to stay on the outside, break you down, or become offensively dominant.

[!PRINCIPLE] Inside position Whether it's the thumb at the upper body or the legs at the lower body, always look for inside position. It's one of the core things we return to over and over again.

5.3 Principle 3 — Retract; don't allow extension

Another principle is the battle between extension and retraction.

In turtle position, your partner's goal is often to create extension on you. Example: Chris takes his left knee inside my elbow and creates a separation/extension — now I go from a situation where I have two hands to defend myself and the strangle, to a situation where I only have one. His ability to extend my upper body gives him a greater advantage.

So my goal from the bottom is retraction — elbows retracted to the knees on the outside, or elbows retracted to the knees on the inside.

He wants to create a situation where, if he goes to block my knee with his outside knee and pull to break me down, he creates extension: my arms move away from my chest, my hands move away from my chin. When that happens, he can reclaim inside position — sit back, step over my leg, create all manner of problems — all because he created extension.

When I stay retracted, even if he does pull to break me down, because elbows and knees are connected and everything is retracted, it's much more difficult for him to get offense going. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but generally speaking, when you're in bottom turtle your primary goal at the beginning is retraction, and your partner's job is to try to extend you.

Same in front headlock. A big part of Chris's goal is to create extension with the arm. If he gets this elbow away from my knee, there's a big gap — he can put his knee, his head, start to run around, create all manner of threats. So whenever we're underneath — you'll hear us referring to this over and over — we want to retract and pull everything in. He wants to extend my right arm; I want to retract it. It's out of this retracted position that we have the ability to move, separate hands, create angles, stand up, roll, and put our back on the floor.

[!PRINCIPLE] Three overarching principles These aren't laws or rules — they're general guidelines, a blueprint:

Get your back to the floor.

Fight for inside position.

Retract; don't allow extension.

As you move through the rest of this course — whether technical or tactical — these three will show up over and over. Keep them in mind as a guideline.

6. Foundational Skill 1 — Grip Fighting

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One of the skills you need in order to feel comfortable from turtle, front headlock, and the back is your ability to grip fight. Understanding gripping and what you're trying to do is important for fundamental skill development in jiu-jitsu overall, but especially from these positions.

When we're working from turtle and front headlock, the gripping strategy is very similar to when your partner is on your back. In fact, the best place to start learning these grips is from rear mount — because gravity isn't pulling you down, your partner's weight isn't on you, and you can focus more on what's happening.

6.1 Primary vs. secondary defensive hand

We have a primary defensive hand and a secondary defensive hand.

The primary defensive hand is always opposite the strangle side. If Chris's right arm is over my shoulder (the strangling arm), then my opposite hand (left) is the primary defensive hand.

Why the opposite side? If I try to use the same side — his right, my right — to pull his arm down, he'll usually be able to walk that hand up to a point where it's no longer a functional defensive grip. On the other hand, when I place the opposite hand on his hand, now we've got a situation where we can physically move our partner's hand across our body. This becomes a kind of closed circuit: the power of my elbow and shoulder working against his arm. As he goes to walk his hand up, I can use more of my body — elbow and shoulder — to create separation.

The secondary hand is four fingers to the inside, supporting the primary hand.

6.2 End of the lever

When you're working here, it's usually better to go all the way to the end of the lever. Given the choice between holding our partner's wrist/forearm and holding our partner's knuckle line, we hold the knuckles. You can't always do that — sometimes he'll clasp over such that you can't reach the knuckles — then you get as close as you can.

So whenever we're gripping, three things together:

Inside position with your thumb.
End of the lever (knuckles).
Primary defensive hand does most of the work; secondary hand supports.

6.3 Hands on top

When we get this grip, our hands are on top. This is another very important thing to keep in mind. Whenever possible, we want our hands on top of our partner's hands. If his hands cover mine, it's very easy for him to strip off my hand. So what we're always looking for, whenever possible, is getting our hands on top of our partner's hands.

6.4 Glue your partner's hands to your body

When we're here, we're usually looking to emphasize a kind of retraction where we're gluing our partner's hands to our body. It's not usually a good idea to have your partner's arms floating out away from your body — there are too many directions they can go. Out there, he has almost unlimited range of motion.

When we connect our partner's hands to our body, he only has a few directions he can go — up one way or down the other — but it's very difficult to pull the hands away when I'm gluing them, and, of course, he can't go further into the chest. So whenever possible, instead of grip-fighting from out here, we want to connect our partner's arms to our body.

[!PRINCIPLE] Gripping checklist

Inside position with thumb.

End of the lever (knuckles).

Primary hand does the work, secondary hand supports.

Hands on top.

Glue the partner's arms to your body (don't fight out in space).

Head on the floor (so both your hands are free for grip fighting, not supporting your head).

6.5 Applied to front headlock and turtle

Front headlock. Chris's right arm is the strangle arm. If left unchecked, he can take this hand and punch it through, and now we're at risk of strangles. So we always take our right to our partner's right — if I can get my hand all the way over his knuckle line, great; sometimes you can't, but that should be the goal. Second hand supports.

Critical: in demonstration my head is up because I'm speaking to you, but usually this work takes place with your head down on the floor. The reason: you need to be able to use both hands, in sequence, to separate your partner's grips. If one of your hands is on the mat supporting your head, you lose a hand to grip with.

Keep the partner's hands connected to you. If he gets this grip and his hands are locked, I want this to be the only grip he has. We don't want a situation where our partners can unlock and switch grips at will. If his hands are locked and I'm doing something other than monitoring his grips — even if I'm not getting strangled — Chris is free to switch grips to other attacks. For example, he could go to an arm-drag grip with his right arm on my arm — and now the threat of back-takes is much greater.

So whenever we're underneath, we have both the idea of defending the strangle and connecting our partner's arms to us. This becomes really important: if Chris wants to switch his grip, there will be a moment where he goes from locked hands to unlocked hands — and once unlocked, we can start to separate and move ourselves out of that dangerous position.

Turtle. Same things apply. If his hands are locked: right-to-right, left hand supportive. If you try to do this with your head up, you'll either face-plant or not be able to use this hand. So head down — hands active and defensive.

When he goes to lock, we keep our partner's arms connected. We don't push his arms away unless there's an immediate threat of strangle — and even then, the goal is usually to move his arms down the body, not out and away. Pushing away is a relatively weak way of defending because he's using both arms — it takes a lot of effort for you to create enough space to pull your head out or anything like that. Keep the hands connected, and we'll see there are many ways to take advantage of trapped arms even in that position.

When hands are in a body lock (tight waist + post): same idea — find a way to separate, start by covering your partner's hands. If our hands are on top, good. If his hands are on top of mine, harder to defend. Cover. Then, if we feel the strangle coming, bring our partner's hand down and pass it up to our primary defensive arm.

If you've done any grip work at all defending the rear strangle and the back mount, the gripping strategies in this series are going to feel very similar — they follow the same principles:

If locked hands, keep them where they are and connected to our body.
Look for inside position whenever possible.
Get our hands on top.
This is true whether strangling at upper body or hands at lower body. If he locks his hands in a body lock down at the waist: our hands cover his, we look for inside position with our thumbs; if he starts to separate/unlock, we keep them separate; if they're down and not going anywhere, we keep them there.

6.6 A progressive drill sequence

A great way to build these skills:

Stage 1 — From rear mount. No gravity pulling you down, no weight on you. Two hands come in: look to separate, cover. If he walks a hand up, bring it back down. Whenever possible, keep it tight. (When we get to back escapes in a later volume, we'll talk more about this.) Get comfortable with the function of primary/secondary defensive hands, keeping hands low, getting hands on top.

Stage 2 — From front headlock. He keeps his hands here, not giving too much resistance; you work on creating separation, moving your head away, resetting. As a drill, then it's his turn — he separates hands, comes back through in front, head to floor, tries to separate. Once separated, we circle the head to the outside. From there, you can become even more dynamic in your gripping.

Stage 3 — From turtle. Begin on two knees, partner may have hands locked at upper body. Because you're drilling and not worried about being finished, you can play from here: cover his hands, bring your arms inside, separate them, create distance. Then it's Chris's turn — whether from body lock (separating his hands, turning to face me), or from seat belt (defending the neck, creating separation, clearing his arm, facing him, standing up, elevating, etc.).

[!DRILL] Simple gripping-drill progression

Rear mount — learn primary/secondary hands, hands on top, stay connected.

Front headlock — same mechanics, head down on mat, partner progressively more active.

Turtle — from both body-lock and seat-belt variations.

Some of the seeds of this are probably already in your training. If you can develop this skill, the techniques in this video will be much easier to execute — because you'll have a very good understanding of how to grip.

7. Foundational Skill 2 — The Elbow Cut

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The second skill that's going to be very important for you is the ability to cut your elbow either to the outside or to the inside. Really understanding that if you can get your elbow to the floor — especially when your partner is attacking your back (which happens off both front headlock and turtle) — in many ways you solve the problem of back exposure from turtle and front headlock.

A lot of elbow cutting has to do with keeping your elbow out. Sometimes it has to do with drawing the elbow across, but usually it has to do with keeping your elbow out and cutting it back.

Two classic problems:

In front headlock, our elbow moving across our centerline is a big problem.
In turtle (with partner on your back), our elbow being locked in place by his chest is a big problem.

We can solve both with the elbow cut.

7.1 Elbow cut in front headlock — don't let your elbow cross centerline

If Chris is in front headlock and he's drawing my elbow across the centerline, nothing good comes out of that:

He can strangle (whatever strangle he likes).
He can roll — even hit an Olympic-style roll and take me through.
Once my elbow is across the centerline, it's even easier for him to hit strangles.
And if I try to sit to guard with my elbow across the centerline, it becomes even more difficult. I may get my legs through, but actually I give him a clean opening to start strangling — and I end up with my elbow trapped.

So being able to recognize when your elbow is going across the centerline — and having the confidence to cut it and draw it open — is a critical skill.

What we're trying to do (tying back to extension vs. retraction): whenever we feel our partner extending our elbow away and drawing it across the centerline, we make a concerted effort to pull our elbow back toward our knee.

You've heard this idea of knee-elbow connection and how important it is. It's important from this position too:

When Chris takes my elbow away from my knee, he exposes my neck, makes it easier to roll, and compromises my base.
Pulling my elbow back preserves my base and makes it a little more difficult for him to strangle.
It also weakens his grip, so once my elbow is back, I can open space to free my head.

Caveat: When you cut your elbow back, you do need to monitor your exposed neck — Chris could take his hand through and threaten strangles. So enter inside position: whenever you feel your partner making that transition, your right hand is there to catch his wrist. From there you can start to separate hands, move to the outside, or roll and put your back on the floor.

So from front headlock: as much as our partner wants to draw our elbow across the centerline, our job is to cut our elbow back and move it to the outside.

7.2 Elbow cut in turtle — get the elbow to the floor

In turtle — especially when a partner has seat-belt position — if we can put our back on the floor, the major issue is that our right elbow is trapped and we can't cut it back enough to free ourselves. If our partner is able to keep our elbow on their chest, it's very difficult for us either to gain meaningful head height or to avoid getting reversed. A lot of times you'll see people finish a Makikomi roll, get to a position, try to get up, and their partner reverses them — re-exposing their back.

The way to get away from back exposure here is by taking this elbow down to the floor. Now, if we were to both roll away — even though he nominally has back control — it's very difficult for him to keep it. Not only that, but it's much easier for us to keep our own back on the mat.

So from here, as we go to trap and take our partner through: when we cut our elbow and draw our back down to the floor, when he goes to move around, it's not that easy — you can see the elbow is down. Even if he goes to put the strangle arm in and tries to strangle, he doesn't have the proper angle or leverage to finish. That comes from your ability to take your elbow down to the floor: it takes your upper back off of your partner's chest, glues it down to the mat, and now the best thing he can do from there is turn up and face you — at which point we take inside position, draw our legs to the inside, and we're out.

Same is true of something like a peek-out. In front headlock, if Chris locks his hands around my chest (a chest-lock), the elbow cut becomes even more important — we have the ability to cut our elbow back.

[!PRINCIPLE] The elbow cut Separating your partner's arms through the elbow cut — and putting your back on the floor through the elbow cut — is critical. Throughout the rest of the course, you'll hear us referring to elbow cuts, paying attention to where that elbow is, and avoiding bringing it across the centerline. This skill is essential whether you're defending front headlock, the back, or turtle.

8. Foundational Skill 3 — The Shoulder Roll

[00:50:20] Watch at 00:50:20

The major skill you need if you want to defend turtle position, front headlock, and even just develop overall mobility and movement when rolling with your partner is the ability to hit a proper shoulder roll.

There are some mechanical elements that will help you hit a better shoulder roll, and a lot of it comes out of understanding what you're trying to do — and what you're not trying to do.

8.1 What the old way got wrong

In the old days, the shoulder roll was thought of as a speed move: you just drop your shoulder, whip your legs around, get your legs in front of you. In a lot of cases it worked. But if it failed, it tended to fail spectacularly.

The old method: partner is off to the side, you drop this shoulder to the floor, roll your body through, try to get legs back in front. Broadly taught as "just try to get your legs back around in front of your partner."

But there are things you can learn to do that will make your job a lot easier.

8.2 The correct mechanics, step by step

We'll use shoulder roll out of a number of different scenarios.

Starting conditions — don't roll from hip-to-hip glue. First thing: we don't usually want to hit a shoulder roll when our hips are glued to our partner's hips. If his hips are right on top of my hips, this is not a great time to shoulder roll. If his hands are locked down at my waist, also not a great time. We need a little bit of separation — because if there's no separation, even a good roll won't succeed in separating his chest from my back. He'll just roll with you. At about halfway through, you'll end up either with crab-ride hooks or he'll throw his hooks back in.

The purpose of the roll is to get your back to the floor. If you don't create enough separation initially, you'll never get your back to the floor — and if you can't, you might as well not roll at all.

So step 1: create separation. If your partner has a tight waist (hand in), one of the best things you can learn to do is take that hand and have some confidence to move that hand to the outside. That's the first thing.

Step 2: Swisher the feet. Take your feet and turn them out in the direction you're rolling. It's possible to hit a shoulder roll on the near side without moving your feet, but it's more difficult. Best practice: with your head down, move your feet out to the side.

Step 3: Step the outside leg up. This helps create more distance and gives our hips some height.

Step 4: The shoulder goes to the mat. It's very important to get comfortable putting your shoulder on the mat. How: take your right hand and reach it toward your left knee. The goal is for the right hand to go under the left leg. Then — first the head, then the shoulder — go to the floor. Now we're in a position with knee down, leg up.

Step 5: Don't flop onto your back. When you go to roll, if you just try to flop down — just turn over — you'll get about this far and then your hips will fall down into his lap. It gets worse if your partner is pulling your hip — if he's pulling at all and you don't hit a proper roll, you'll often end up getting dropped down to your back. This is arguable whether better or not; at least now you face each other and can try to regard, but it's still not ideal — a missed opportunity.

Step 6: Get your inside knee up off the mat. After getting to this position, even if Chris is close, get your inside knee off the mat. When the knee comes off the mat, you can use it to drive, to push into your partner.

8.3 Aim hips at the armpit, not at the hips

Step 7: Push hips into your partner's armpit — not his hips.

This is very specific: our hips into his armpit. Even if you just make your body strong here — even if he's resistant, pushing back — you have the force of your legs to push your hips into him.

If you have limited flexibility, the position with two shoulders on the mat and head between your knees might be hard — but you're not going to hang out there. You're going to take your legs and add them to the weight over your partner's body. That gives you the space to put your feet back in front. Practically, this is what happens in a lot of the cases: even when you can be proactive and come back into triangles, upper-body attacks, lower-body attacks — often, especially with someone stronger and more athletic, you're going to find that pushing your hips up into your partner's armpit and putting the weight of your legs down on top of them is critical.

[!PRINCIPLE] Hips → armpit, not hips → hips If you aim your hips at your partner's hips, you're going to get collapsed. Aim instead at his armpit. Once you push into his armpit and he pulls his arm back / retracts and squares up to you, you'll often find yourself in some form of open guard.

8.4 If you get stuck: walk on your shoulders

If you ever get stuck in your shoulder roll — you have a very big partner, you're pushing your hips up into their armpit, they're pushing back, you're stuck — you need to be ready to walk on your shoulders. All that means is a shimmying action with your two shoulders, walking backwards along the mat. From there, take inside position with your legs, and you're ready to play.

8.5 Flexibility adjustments

If flexibility is an issue:

You won't be able to hang out in those compressed positions — doesn't matter.
Your goal is still aiming your hips up to your partner's armpit, not down by their hips.
Get to the initial posture (right shoulder down, left leg up).
When you go to roll, sweep your head through as close as you can.
You may find it easier to walk out a bit — and then come up into the same posture. Even from there, you can push off and use the momentum of your legs to put weight on him, then start to pull your legs.

Flexibility issues shouldn't stop you from doing the mechanically correct shoulder roll. When you start being confident doing that, a lot of stuff from guard — even just guard retention — benefits from this. And if you're talking about regarding from turtle, it's going to be much easier.

[!DRILL] Shoulder roll — mechanical sequence (summary)

Clear the hand (create separation from tight waist).

Swisher the feet to the outside.

Step the outside leg up.

Head down, shoulder down. Right hand reaches for left knee (and under the left leg).

Lift inside knee off the mat. Foot plants, ready to drive.

Push hips up to the armpit — not the hips.

If stuck, shoulder-walk backwards and take inside position with the legs.

9. Foundational Skill 4 — Standing Up

[00:58:35] Watch at 00:58:35

We just looked at how to do a shoulder roll and put our back on the floor — a very jiu-jitsu approach to managing front headlock and turtle. But there will be times you don't feel comfortable rolling, or you're not able to. In those moments, you need to be able to stand up.

9.1 Why standing matters — even if you don't wrestle

Standing up has a lot of great virtues. The main virtue, the way I was taught, is not that you can then stand up and wrestle (you may be with someone who's a better wrestler). The main virtue is: when you stand up, there are not that many submissions.

It's not that there are none — certainly there are some, especially flying attacks or rolling attacks. But if you can get from a position where you're both on your knees to one where you're standing and they're on their knees, that's a huge advantage. And if you both stand up, the likelihood is that they're not going to be able to submit you. So being able to stand up is a critical skill.

Other benefits:

You're going to want to chain standing-style escapes with rolling-style escapes. And you don't need to be great at standing up, or even really need to actually stand — you just need to threaten it. The threat of a stand-up prompts a response from your partner, and that often makes it much easier to hit the rolls you were originally intending to do.
Standing up creates space and separation. We talked about creating distance so you can get a wedge inside, get inside position. If your partner is super tight and you feel like you can't roll, there's no inside position — but moving up into a standing position often gives you the ability to get your thumb inside, or take your hand and find the inside of his wrist.

Going back to the three core principles: some of them will not be accessible to you just by doing one thing. If all you ever do is shoulder roll, not only are you predictable — your partner is going to develop and bring pressures you won't be able to manage. You need an alternative. That's where standing up comes in.

I did a lot of wrestling with Mr. Danaher, but I'm not a wrestler — so although I learned a lot about stand-up and takedowns, I don't consider myself a wrestler. If a great wrestler were here, there'd be a lot of critiques of my standing up. But: you don't have to be great at standing up in order to create the opportunities you need to go back on the offensive or establish a strong defense out of these positions. The goal is not to be a master stand-up artist — it's simply to use standing to create space/distance/separation, start to elbow cut, start to retract your elbows, and get to a place where you can offset your partner's ability to attack.

Two basic classes of stand-up:

Method A: Knees off the floor first (hips first) — out of front headlock.
Method B: Chest first (elbows/hands off the floor first) — out of turtle.

The rule of thumb: from front headlock, stand hips-first. From turtle, stand chest-first. This is because in turtle, if your partner has a lot of weight on your hands and elbows, you can't lift them off first.

9.2 Method A — Hips first (from front headlock)

Out of front headlock: if we feel we can't get anything else going, and especially if our partner is putting a lot of pressure on our arms, we may elect to come up into a standing position.

It's not without risk. Once your hands are on the floor, they're committed to the mat, not to your defense up top. But there will be times you need to do this.

Mechanics:

Knees off the floor, hips first. Place your hands on the mat. If you were on your shoelaces, you now put your toes on the mat.
Go up into the push-up-like position.
Push off your hands, push off your knees, and get into a "down dog" position — hands fairly close to your feet.
Don't stay elongated. When you stand up, you don't want to be extended — because from here you're not athletic, you're relatively elongated, and if Chris gives even a short pull, he'll drop you back down.
Tuck your chin. Look at your belly.
Ears inside your shoulders. Even if his hands are locked around you, we move up into this position with ears inside shoulders.

If we want to take our hands off the floor, we walk backwards with our hands, so we can take weight off them and then use them to unlock our partner's grip, grip fight, counter, etc.

[!DRILL] Building the hips-first stand-up If you're not comfortable going from knees to standing, build this skill with a loose, light grip from your partner. Practice:

Putting hands on the floor and toes on the floor.

Doing the push-up so that your shoulders are forward.

Turning your chin slightly (so you're looking at your right arm).

Walking backwards to whatever degree you can — until you feel comfortable taking your hands off the floor and opening up your partner's grips.

9.3 Method B — Chest first, leg up (from turtle)

The second way of standing up: instead of starting by taking our knees off the floor, we start by taking our hands or elbows off the floor. If your partner has a lot of weight on your hands/elbows, you can't do this — so we stand up chest-first from turtle, and hips-first from front headlock.

Scenario: partner in turtle with hands in a body lock (two hands locked around my waist).

Mechanics:

Create separation — take your feet to the outside slightly.
Step the left leg up. Take this hand, bring my head up slightly, and then the left leg comes up.
Elbow-knee connection. Keep elbow and knee close together.
Monitor the other side. We don't want our partner throwing the right leg in, so this hand is here monitoring.
Sprinter-in-the-blocks posture. Once you get your body to this position, it almost looks like you're a sprinter in the blocks — like you're about to take off running. That's a really great option: take your foot, place the sole on the floor, and from here push off to a standing position.
Once standing, it's on you to cover your partner's hands, separate them, come back, take underhook, space your partner, and shoot.

Summary of the chest-first stand-up:

Step the outside leg up.
Cover partner's hands, or place your hands on the floor.
Bring your head up.
Keep elbow and knee relatively close.
Second hand monitoring.

Obviously, we're not going to stay there — if we feel there's a risk he'll throw the hook inside, we'll often keep our body down in a more crouched position. Then, when we're ready to stand up, we push off and literally move away from our partner.

Once you're standing: separate your partner's hands, either cut back to face him or simply create separation/distance so you can face him. If you want to wrestle, you can — but from here you can also sit back down and begin to play your guard the way you want, go into leg attacks, off-balances, etc.

Recap — two methods:

Hips first — and walking back to a standing position.
Chest first — elbows off the floor, then our leg comes up.

These play a very important role in linking us from our favorite escapes (putting our back on the floor) to other escapes. We're looking to create distance and separation. At this level of jiu-jitsu — the modern evolution — you can't have only one method. Again, you don't have to be an expert at standing up, you don't have to be willing to wrestle your partner, but you do have to have a sense of what you're supposed to be doing: safely coming up with hands on the floor, safely coming up with knees off the floor. If you can do that, you'll have additional confidence for your major escapes, and everything becomes a lot easier when it comes to getting out of these positions.

10. How to Use This Video — A Learning Protocol

[01:07:58] Watch at 01:07:58

What's the best way to make use of this video?

You can certainly start from the beginning and watch all the way through — that gives you a very good overall picture of what we're trying to accomplish, what the course looks like, and its contours. But if you really want to develop the skills and understand how to make use of the techniques, it's probably best to use it a bit differently.

The structure of this video

The first part is conceptual and principle-based. It includes some examples, but it's a lot about the broad mechanical elements and skills you need to enact techniques properly, and an overview of things you should be thinking about when you're practicing.
Then come the techniques themselves.

It's a lot of material. Any video course longer than about an hour is going to be too much to absorb sequentially in a period of days.

Three ways to use the course

1. Executive-summary first. We'll include an executive summary in this video so you can watch that summary in small pieces — see what the individual techniques are — and if particular techniques appeal to you, go back into the "exploded diagram" of them in the rest of the video.

2. Troubleshooting tool. If you have a particular issue on the mats with turtle or front headlock, use the summary or index to locate it, and just go watch that specific piece as a reference.

3. Systematic study. Start with the first part (focus on front headlock), go into class or onto the mat, and begin to develop these skills individually. Over weeks of doing it in sequence — with this as your area of focus — you'll start to develop a natural vocabulary and understanding of what you're supposed to be doing, and you'll start to see these things naturally as they show up.

A personal anecdote on revisiting material

A quick personal anecdote: there were many times (and even now) where, as a student on the mat, I would see the same material — many of the same things I'd seen before. This is a deliberate choice, I think, because:

When you first began training, you probably learned the knee-elbow escape as a way to get out of mount.
As a white belt you used it as best you could with the skills you had.
As a blue belt you probably learned it again. The technique itself probably didn't change that much — but you changed. The skills you brought to a knee-elbow escape at blue belt were different from white.
Same thing at purple, at black belt.

The context of what you're learning changes. It's not so much that the actual techniques are undergoing an evolution (although they are — people are always improving and innovating), but you are improving and evolving, and so you look at the technique with a different eye.

This is what should happen when you use a course like this correctly. You start to immerse yourself in front headlock, and it goes from being a thing you're terrified of — always worried about getting strangled, feel like you don't have any resources, not sure what to do — to a place where you go, "Oh, you know what — I can see what's going on here. Every time I'm in this position with my partner, I'm not controlling the grips and they're always running around behind me."

[!PRINCIPLE] Closing the gap between attack and response The way this stuff tends to happen is in pieces, not all at once.

You start by recognizing what's happening. Then you start to put a gap between the attack and your response. When that gap opens sufficiently wide, you can get your defense going.

A simple practical plan

One of the best ways to do this is to immerse yourself and set a goal — it doesn't have to be the whole video. Pick two or three techniques that you're working on and break them down systematically. You may have lessons from your instructor following their own curriculum — it's all good, you don't have to go against that — but if you've got an extra 10 minutes before or after class, you grab a partner and say, "Okay, we're working on front-headlock defense, because this is something that's been giving me problems. Let's run a few of these techniques."

Drill progressively — don't train at max resistance

When you do that, it's really important that you don't drill at max resistance. Some of the drills we already gave you are very incremental. Example: if I'm working with Chris and I want to develop the shoulder roll, and he's on my back, I may:

Stage 1 — Open hands, light pressure. Start with his hands open, minimal grip fighting required. I don't have to worry about my neck. He's just there, maybe pulling/pushing every once in a while. I get used to the mechanics: getting my partner's hand out, stepping the leg up, hitting the roll. Initially he doesn't give me much resistance at all, and I can feel free to pummel my legs and get the basic step.
Stage 2 — Slightly assertive hands. He's a little more assertive with his hands. I can still separate them, but now when I go to hit the roll maybe he's leaning in on me a bit, so I push back into him more.
Stage 3 — Pushing, circling, locking hands. Eventually: he's pushing, circling, locking his hands. I play a little here — try to get everything separated — he's stepping his legs up, it looks a little sloppier. And from here, now we've got opportunities to build a whole skill set — not only ending up doing our defensive techniques, but working our way into more offensive techniques.

You have to have a developmental sense about how you approach this stuff, and you have to be patient. Impatience is something we all struggle with. If you're too impatient, you'll try to put the video series on, get frustrated partway through, and give up and switch to something else. You may do that anyway — that's fine. But in terms of how you can maximize the use of this, these are my recommendations.

Good luck. And now we're going to go into some of the meat of the course.

Appendix — The Mental Map at a Glance

This is a study-aid summary of the instructor's own framework — nothing new has been added.

The problem

Turtle and front headlock aren't pins, but feel like pins. They come with lack of control and scramble. They share with the back position the property of chest-to-back attack.

The big two questions on the bottom

Is my partner staying in front (strangling) or going behind?
Am I winning the grip fight?

The three core principles

Get your back on the floor.
Fight for inside position.
Retract; don't allow extension. (elbow-knee connection; don't let elbow cross centerline)

The four foundational skills

Grip fighting — primary/secondary hand, inside position, end of lever, hands on top, glue to body, head on floor.
Elbow cut — keep elbow out of centerline (front headlock); get elbow to floor (turtle).
Shoulder roll — separate first → swisher feet → step leg up → shoulder down → inside knee up → hips into armpit (not hips).
Standing up — hips-first from front headlock; chest-first / leg-up from turtle. Purpose: space/separation + threaten to open roll options.

Tactical flow on the bottom

Diagnose → defend neck (defensive responsibility) → grip fight (inside position, hands on top, glue to body) → create Kuzushi / misdirection → hit elbow cut or create separation → back to the floor (via roll or sit) or stand up → re-establish an offensive position.

Drill progression

Rear mount → front headlock → turtle. Incremental resistance, not max. Open hands → assertive hands → pushing/circling/locked hands. Build defensive + offensive at every stage.

End of Volume 01 — conceptual foundations and core skills. The "meat of the course" (the techniques proper) begins in the next section of the video series.

Linked pages on this site

Each principle and foundational skill from this volume has its own page — all content on those pages is quoted verbatim from this transcript.

Principle 1 → Back to the floor
Principle 2 → Inside position
Principle 3 → Retract; don't allow extension
Skill 1 → Grip fighting
Skill 2 → The elbow cut
Skill 3 → The shoulder roll
Skill 4 → Standing up

Defense and Escapes to Turtle Position and Front Headlock — Volume 01

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