THE BARBARIAN VS THE MONK: BRUTALITY OVER TECHNIQUE-PART I: SLAMMING YOUR WAY OUT OF THE TRIANGLE CHOKE

This title is a massively over ambitious word salad, but this is fundamentally a combination of all of my nerdy obsessions and philosophy, so let’s give it a shot.  In fact, it got so overly ambitious I ended up having to break it into a few parts. 

This request comes by way of reader “The American”, who requested I discuss my experience in combat sports as it related to my focus on strength, and I quickly replied that I was a pretty awful combat sports athlete due to my inherent lack of athleticism and coordination along with my propensity toward oafishness.  Techniques basically took me twice as long to learn, which also meant my toolbox was half as big as everyone else, so I only knew a handful of submissions and the odds of me really landing one was pretty limited.  However, the one area I DID tend to shine was strength and conditioning (ok, so that’s two areas), with the former seemingly significantly neglected by a majority of those training for the sport.  Sometimes this was a hindrance, as it meant that I was prone to trying to force submissions to work rather than rely on technique, but other times it opened up avenues that were not regularly afforded to other trainees, to include one of my favorite submission defenses of all time: slamming out of the triangle choke.

Before going on any further, for those of you unfamiliar with the triangle choke as it relates to combat sports, allow me to provide some examples of what I’m talking about

For you BJJ elitist out there, I'm sure everyone in these pictures is doing it wrong and only you have the one true lineage

As you can see, the move is fairly technical and relies on the mastery of the person on the bottom (in the guard position) to be able to effectively position and maneuver themselves such that they use their aggressor’s OWN arm along with the defender’s legs to choke out their opponent.  Like the majority of submissions, there’s an understanding that the only defense against a submission is BEFORE it’s locked in, as, once it’s locked in, it’s not simply a matter of time before the person being submitted either passes out or has a limb broken, at which point they need to “tap out” and admit defeat.

However, for those of you that aren’t versed in combat sports and simply read my blog as lifters, let me ask you something: doesn’t this look like the bottom of a good morning?

Rest assured: someone is about to have a bad morning

Oh boy did I love slamming people once they had the triangle choke on me, because it is one of those things you can only get away with if you’re decently strong, which, in turn, makes it a pretty unpredictable “submission defense”.  And I put submission defense in quotes because anyone who actually plays the submission game will scoff at this, since it’s absolutely NOT grappling and is simply pure brutality as a means of escaping.  But slamming people out of the triangle choke wasn’t just as active submission defense: it was passive as well.  Primarily because, once you slam a dude out of a triangle choke the first time, they REALLY don’t want that to happen to them again.  Most folks tend to think they’re going to be in a “comfortable” position when they have the triangle choke locked in, and when you start aggressively slamming the everloving hell out of the back of their skull, that comfort is gone, and now you’ve removed that entire tool from their toolbox.  This is true to the point that I’d very often BAIT the triangle choke, get into someone’s guard, give my arm away as a gift, wait for the triangle to start getting applied, and then smash them until they gave it up, knowing that I’d now removed that threat from the fight and they had to now fight MY stupid game of fighting, with little technique and lots of brutality.  Because, as we often observe, one can overcome a discrepancy in technique with a massive surplus of brutality.

One of the best displays of this ever in the sport of MMA was Bob Sapp vs Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira which, if you’ve not had the delight of viewing before, I will link below.  Specifically with the Joe Rogan commentary, because Joe (rightfully) spends the majority of the fight marveling over how gigantic Bob Sapp is and how he was holding his own against one of the greatest Jiu Jitsu fighters of all time

Here is the most important part, if you don't want to watch the whole video

Coming into this fight, Bob had an amount of fight training time and experience that could be measured by episodes of King of the Hill, but he brought something that is very hard to prepare for in training: an absurd amount of brutality…paired with a 150lb bodyweight advantage that was ALL muscle.  When Nog went for a takedown, Bob sprawled on Nog, wrapped his arms around his body, PICKED HIM UP AND PILEDROVE HIM.  They may say that a triangle, once successfully applied, has no defense, but I’m pretty sure they meant the piledriver when they wrote that, because what the hell are you supposed to do there?  Watch the whole fight, see Bob muscle out of subs, throw Nog out of the mount, and spend his time “trapped” in Nog’s guard smashing his face into a bloody pulp with hammerfists, completely oblivious to the “danger” of being in the guard of a talented jiu jitsu fighter.  Yes, Nog DOES win (spoilers), but boy did it take a LOT of technique to finally survive and overcome that brutality.

And we saw this same sort of brutality when it came to Tank Abbott and Brock Lesnar, and in doing so, people will say the same thing: “that wasn’t brutality winning: it was strength.  The weight difference was so significant that it was insurmountable”.  Ok: let’s take an example of two guys in the same weight class: Matt Hughes vs Carlos Newton

Once again, a quick summary

There it is.  Carlos Newton was a phenomenal jiu jitsu fighter, and though Matt Hughes was a very accomplished wrestler, he wasn’t known for his submission game or technical skill.  And when Carlos had that triangle locked on, I’m sure he thought that the fight was over.  It was sunk deep and as tight as it could get, and when Matt picked him up, you can briefly see where Carlos gives it a smirk, as though it was the desperate act of a dying man…until it dawns on him just how committed Matt is toward getting this slam.  To the point that Matt employed his own body’s failing consciousness as the mechanism to slam Carlo’s skull full force into the mat, rendering him totally unconscious.  And all Matt needed was for the blood to get to his brain faster than Carlos regained consciousness from a massive concussion: the kind of insane plan that can ONLY be hatched from brutality.

This discussion can go on forever, and for the sake of brevity I’m going to wrap it up here and save more for future parts, but think of the lessons one can take from the example of slamming your way out of the triangle choke.  In competition, you’ll inevitably go up against someone that, on paper, is better than you in every single way, yet the variable you can control that can lead to victory is just how much brutality you are willing to bring.  Someone who is technically better than you may simply not be prepared for just how ridiculous and mean you are willing to be in order to escape defeat and secure victory.  The same is true when it comes to dealing with the adversity of existence or your training: even when you are “beaten”, there is always the option of success by brutality.  And much like how it’s a passive defense of the triangle, display enough brutality often and frequently enough and, pretty soon, nothing seeks to ever put you in that triangle choke again.