The Guard in BJJ: What It Is, and Why You're Dangerous on Your Back

By: Professor Itay Leibovich | 3rd Degree Black Belt, Gracie Jiu Jitsu | September 2026 | ~13 min read

"Itay, I'm losing."

I hear that sentence from almost every beginner in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, in their first or second week on the mat. He's lying on his back with someone heavier on top of him, and his brain does exactly what every human brain does in that position: it declares defeat. Everything we've seen in life, from the schoolyard to action movies, has taught us that whoever is on the bottom has lost and whoever is on top has won. End of story.

Then I lean down and tell him: "You're not losing. You're holding guard."

He looks at me as if I'd told him the Ayalon Highway at 6 pm is a shortcut.

That's the moment most people first meet the strangest, and most important, idea in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: you can lie on your back and be the most dangerous person in the room. I've been training for 36 years and teaching for 16, and I still see it on a beginner's face every time it clicks for the first time. Something in his picture of the world shifts.

So let's talk about the guard. What it is, why it works, what you do from it, and why ours looks a little different from what you'll see on YouTube.

What Is the Guard in Jiu Jitsu?

The guard is any position where you're on your back or seated, with your legs between you and your opponent. That's it. That's the whole definition.

Sounds simple? It is. So is the idea behind it. In most martial arts the legs do two things: stand and kick. In jiu jitsu they become a second pair of arms, stronger than your arms. They push, pull, wrap, block and lift. The biggest muscles in your body, your thighs and glutes, stop being just the thing that keeps you standing and start working for you in the fight.

And here's the part that takes beginners a while to get: as long as your legs are between you, your opponent isn't really controlling you. He's on top, sure. He may be twenty kilos heavier. But to control you he first has to get past your legs. Until he does, you're not the one being controlled. You're the one defending, and waiting for the chance to attack.

That's why the guard isn't "a bad spot you need to get out of". It's a position. It has control, defense and offense. On the ladder of positions, which I covered in detail in my post on Position Before Submission, the guard sits in the middle: not the best, and a long way from the worst. And that's exactly where BJJ differs from most martial arts. In boxing, the guy on the floor gets a count. In jiu jitsu, he gets an opportunity.

The Night the World Discovered the Guard

December 1994, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The final of UFC 4. On one side, Dan Severn: an American wrestler, 1.88 meters, 115 kilos, twice an alternate on the US Olympic wrestling team. On the other, Royce Gracie, Helio's son, a skinny guy of about eighty kilos in a white gi. (How Royce got there in the first place, and why the family chose him of all people, I covered in What Is Gracie Jiu Jitsu.)

Severn did exactly what a good wrestler is supposed to do. He took Royce down, got inside his guard, and put his weight on him. One minute. Five minutes. Ten. That tournament had no time limits and no rounds, so no bell was coming to save anyone. Almost everyone watching saw a big man lying on a small man and drew the obvious conclusion. Unless they had watched the three UFC events before it.

Royce wasn't just lying under him. He was in guard. The whole time his legs were working: controlling distance, stopping Severn from settling on top, and waiting. And after more than fifteen minutes, in one moment, it opened. Royce's legs closed around Severn's neck and arm in the shape of a triangle. Triangle choke. 15:49. Severn tapped.

Fifteen minutes "losing", one second winning. If there's one fight I'd show every beginner who tells me "I'm losing", it's this one.

Why the Guard Works: A Fight Over Comfort

To understand how you can win from the bottom, you need to understand what you're really fighting over in jiu jitsu. Not who's on top, but who's comfortable.

Rickson Gracie, Helio's son and one of the family's legendary fighters, put it in a line I come back to in almost every guard class:

"In the fight, only one person can be comfortable. Your job is to transfer the comfortable from your opponent to you."

Think about it from the top player's point of view. He's inside your guard, supposedly in the good spot. But your legs are locked around his waist, pulling him forward. Your hands hold his collar and sleeve. Every time he straightens up, you pull him back down. Every time he puts a hand on the mat to stabilise, that hand becomes a target. He can't breathe easy, can't straighten up, can't plan. He's on top, and he isn't comfortable.

And you? You're on your back, the mat is supporting your whole body, and you're saving energy. That's the whole doctrine in a nutshell: don't just survive from the bottom, turn his spot into a little hell and yours into a beach hut in Sinai.

From the outside, jiu jitsu sometimes looks like two people rolling around on the floor with no order at all. From the inside, most of what happens in the guard is exactly this struggle. Who sweats more, who tires first, who waits quietly for the other one's mistake.

The Guards You'll Meet in Your First Months

Ask ten jiu jitsu students how many guards there are and you'll get ten answers, at least one of which will include a guard invented last week. I won't overload you. In the first months there are three families worth knowing, and that's roughly the order we teach them in at our academy in Tel Aviv.

Closed Guard

This is the classic guard, the one Helio Gracie's generation built a huge part of the game on. Your legs wrap around your opponent's waist and your ankles lock together behind his back. He can't go anywhere without first opening your legs, and that's much harder than it looks from the outside.

From closed guard you learn the foundation of everything: breaking your opponent's posture (pulling him down so he can't straighten up), turning him onto his back with a sweep, and hunting classic submissions like the straight armbar, kimura, triangle, cross collar choke and guillotine. It's the first place new students feel that lying on your back can be a weapon, not a loss or a punishment.

Half Guard

Here only one of your opponent's legs is trapped between yours. For years half guard was seen as a poor in-between position, what was left when your opponent had almost passed. Then along came Roberto "Gordo" Correa.

In the late eighties, as a purple belt, he tore the ACL in his knee. His doctor told him to stop and have surgery. He didn't wait. He went back to training from the bottom, defending with one leg only. Half guard, all the time, because he had no choice. And when you're stuck somewhere long enough, you start looking for ways to attack from it. He built a whole game around one grip, an arm under the opponent's armpit (the underhook), and turned half guard into one of the most important attacking positions in modern jiu jitsu.

There's something in this story I love telling people who come to me with an old injury or knees that aren't twenty anymore: your limitation doesn't cancel your jiu jitsu. Sometimes it builds it. (If that's you, I wrote a full guide on BJJ after 35.)

Open Guard

Any guard where your legs aren't locked around your opponent. Feet on his hips. Hooks inside his thighs (butterfly guard). Feet on his arms with grips on his sleeves (spider guard), and more. Open guard is a game of distance and movement, less locking and more balance. It needs more coordination, which is why it usually comes after the closed guard basics are in place.

Some open guards work much better in the gi, because they rely on grips on the fabric. I covered the differences between training with and without the gi in Gi vs No-Gi.

And there's one open guard I have a personal connection with. In the eighties, a guy named Ricardo De La Riva developed an outside hook around his opponent's leg, mainly because he was tired of heavier training partners crushing him. In the middle of the decade he used it to beat Royler Gracie in competition, when Royler was considered almost unbeatable. The guard was named after him, and to this day it's one of the most common guards in the BJJ world.

Royler Gracie, Helio's son, is my teacher's teacher and one of the greatest competitors in the history of the sport. So yes, I proudly teach a guard named after the man who beat my professional grandfather. That's jiu jitsu. You respect what works, even when it stings a little. As Carlson Gracie said, you either win, or you learn.

What You Do From the Guard: Four Jobs

Comfortable, yes. Resting, no. (Not in my class, anyway.) When you're in guard you have four jobs, roughly in this order:

• Control: break your opponent's posture, close the distance, keep it or open it, so he can't attack you and can't pass your legs.

• Reverse: a sweep, meaning you turn your opponent so he's on his back and you're on top. In competition it's worth two points. On the street it's worth a lot more.

• Submit: an armlock or a choke, when your opponent gives you the opening. Not before.

• Get up: sometimes the smartest move from guard is simply getting back to your feet safely, with a technique called the technical stand-up, or stand-up in base.

Notice the order. Control first, submission later. New students almost always do it the other way round: lie in guard, see an arm, jump on it, lose the guard, and the opponent passes and settles on top of them. That's exactly what the Position Before Submission principle is meant to prevent, and it's as true from the bottom as it is from the top.

Everything I've described here is from the bottom player's side. The top player is trying to do the exact opposite: get past your legs (a guard pass), reach side control or mount (sitting on the opponent's stomach), and take the comfort back for himself. The bottom player's skill of stopping that is called guard retention, and in your first year it matters more than any sweep. The battle over the legs, guard versus guard pass, may be the central conversation of every jiu jitsu class. In the next posts in this series we'll go up a floor, to mount and side control.

The Guard on the Street: Where Gracie Jiu Jitsu Differs From the Sport

I'll be direct here, because this is where a lot of people get confused, including people who've been training for years.

In sport competition, the guard is sometimes a choice. Competitors "pull guard": they sit down on purpose and drag their opponent with them, because under the sport's rules there are no strikes, no concrete, and no friend of the opponent waiting on the side. That's completely legitimate within the rules, and the modern sport guard has amazing creativity. Some of what you see in competitions today would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

On the street it's different. I don't want any of my students choosing to lie down on a sidewalk on Dizengoff Street. In self-defense, the guard isn't plan A. It's the plan for when plan A failed: you tripped, got pushed, got taken down. In that moment, what makes the difference isn't whether you know twenty open guard variations, but whether you can do three things under someone who's trying to hit you:

• Control the distance: either very close, tight to him, so he has no room to generate a hard strike, or far, with your feet on his hips, so his punches don't reach you. The dangerous zone is the middle.

• Protect your head: your arms and legs work together so your head isn't the open target.

• Get up safely: back to your feet without giving him a chance to hit you on the way up.

That's the difference between a self-defense guard and a sport guard. It's not a different technique, it's a different filter. Every movement is tested against the question "what happens if the guy on top of me is trying to hit me?". That assumption used to be obvious, because the Gracie guard was tested again and again in vale tudo fights with almost no rules. With us it's still the starting point. (I went deeper into this in the guide on why self-defense in jiu jitsu works.)

When the Attacker Is Between Your Legs

There's one situation I want to talk about directly, because it's the reason many of the women who come to me come in the first place. In one of the most common sexual assault scenarios, the woman is on her back with the attacker on top of her, between her legs. In our world that position has a name, and it isn't a frightening one. It's called guard.

And that's not wordplay, it's a practical difference. A woman who has never been there does what her body dictates: she pushes him with her arms from underneath, fights with strength that is smaller than his to begin with, and stays exactly where she is. A woman who has trained knows this position from thousands of repetitions against partners who really resist, and she knows what to do from the first second: keep distance with her legs and hips so he can't settle on her, protect her head, neutralise his arms, move her hips, and from there reverse him or get up and get out.

I won't promise anyone that jiu jitsu solves sexual assault. No method can promise that, and anyone who does is lying. What I will say is this: I struggle to think of another method that trains this exact situation, over and over, against real resistance, without hurting anyone. In a world that mostly teaches what to do at a distance, this is exactly the part left without an answer. With us, it's the lesson.

One more thing, because it matters: against multiple attackers or a weapon, no guard will save you. The rule there is simple: get up and get out as fast as you can.

Why Beginners Hate the Guard (and Why They End Up Loving It)

In your first months of jiu jitsu, the guard is frustrating. You're on your back, someone with six months more than you passes your legs as if they weren't there, and you feel like you're doing everything right and nothing works. New students try to make up for it with strength: squeezing with their legs until their thighs burn, gripping the collar with everything they've got, and after two minutes you're done. Again and again and again.

Jean Jacques Machado, a member of the Gracies' extended family, was born with only two fingers on his left hand, and is still considered one of the great guard players of his generation. He said something I really love:

"The more you know, the less you use. To use less, you need to know more."

That's what progress in the guard looks like. At first you use everything, because you know nothing. A year later you use the angle of your hip, one foot in the right place, one grip on the sleeve. You barely sweat, and the guy on top sweats for both of you. And the first time that happens to you, you understand why so many experienced students actually prefer being on the bottom.

I won't lie to you: it takes time. The guard is one of the reasons the gentle art is so hard for beginners. But this isn't the time you're losing. It's the time you're building your jiu jitsu.

Why the Guard Is the Smaller Person's Weapon

If there's one position that explains why Brazilian Jiu Jitsu suits women, older people and anyone smaller than their opponent so well, this is it.

Standing up, size and weight speak loudly. Whoever is heavier pushes, whoever is stronger pulls. On the ground, from the bottom, the game changes. Your opponent's weight is on you, but your legs are a lever. And the lever, as Archimedes understood long before Helio Gracie, doesn't care how much you weigh.

That's what lets a 55-kilo woman survive under an 85-kilo man, and sometimes even reverse him. Not by magic, and not in every roll. But often enough that it stops being a surprise. At our academy in Tel Aviv the women's group is the largest in Israel, about thirty percent of our members, and one of the first things new women members discover with us is exactly this: your back isn't the end of the story. I wrote about it in the guide to women's self-defense in Tel Aviv.

And that, by the way, is exactly the filter Helio Gracie left us. When I teach guard, I don't ask whether it works for me. I ask whether it will work for the smallest woman on the mat against the biggest man. If not, it doesn't make it into the class. Any BJJ built that way, from the bottom up, works for people who don't have the physical attributes too.

How to Start Learning Guard in Tel Aviv

You're on your back, someone's on top of you, and your legs are doing the work. You don't need to imagine it. Come and try.

In your first class with us you'll almost certainly meet the closed guard. We'll learn how to hold it, how to break posture, and maybe one simple sweep. You'll drill in pairs, without resistance at first, with a partner who knows you're new. Nobody expects you to leave with a black belt's guard. It's enough to leave understanding that your back isn't where the fight ends. If you want to know what else is waiting for you, I have a full guide on what really happens in your first jiu jitsu class.

And if you're still deciding between academies, my advice is simple: before you sign up, ask how much of the class is spent on the ground and the guard, and whether they teach the guard against strikes too. It's the question worth asking at every jiu jitsu academy, ours or anywhere else. The answer will tell you a lot about the place.

The Israeli Academy of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA is at 29 Yitzhak Sadeh Street in Tel Aviv. All the details about classes and instructors are on the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Tel Aviv page. To book a trial class, send a WhatsApp message to 055-9212-431 (messages only, not calls).

Frequently Asked Questions About the Guard

What is the guard in jiu jitsu, and how does it work?

The guard is a position where you're on your back or seated, with your legs between you and your opponent. Your legs act as a second pair of arms: they control distance, block your opponent, and let you reverse or submit him. As long as your legs are between you, your opponent isn't really controlling you.

Is being in guard the same as losing?

No, being in guard is not losing: in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu the guard is a position with defense and offense, not a state of defeat. From guard you can control your opponent, sweep him, submit him or get up. At UFC 4, Royce Gracie beat a wrestler about 35 kilos heavier with a triangle choke from guard, after more than fifteen minutes on his back.

What is the difference between closed guard and open guard?

In closed guard your legs wrap around your opponent's waist and your ankles are locked behind his back. It's a stable guard, very well suited to beginners and to self-defense. In open guard your legs aren't locked, and your feet work on your opponent's hips, arms or legs. It's more dynamic, and needs more movement and flexibility.

What is half guard?

Half guard is a position where only one of your opponent's legs is trapped between yours. It used to be seen as a weak in-between position, but since the late eighties, mainly thanks to Roberto "Gordo" Correa, it has become a full attacking position with its own sweeps and submissions.

Does the guard work for self-defense on the street?

Yes, the guard works in self-defense as a backup for when you've been taken down, not as plan A. In Gracie Jiu Jitsu you learn to control distance under someone trying to hit you, protect your head and get up safely. Against multiple attackers or a weapon, the goal is to get up and get away as fast as possible.

How long does it take to learn a good guard?

You learn the basics of the closed guard in the first few weeks. A guard that works against resisting partners at your level usually takes months of consistent training, and a mature, varied guard game is the work of years. People who train two or three times a week feel a real improvement within the first year.

Is the guard suitable for women and older people?

Yes, the guard is one of the most effective tools for women and older people, because it's based on leverage rather than strength. It relies on the legs, the strongest muscles in the body, so it works even for someone smaller or weaker than their opponent. At the Israeli Academy of Jiu Jitsu in Tel Aviv, adult men and women of all ages learn guard from their very first class.

Bottom Line: Being on Your Back Isn't the End

Most of the world teaches you that whoever is on the bottom has lost. Jiu jitsu teaches you to ask a different question: who's comfortable? Who controls the distance? Who waits quietly, and who sweats for both of you?

The guard is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu's answer to the moment most martial arts try to skip, the moment you're on the ground with someone on top of you. It doesn't promise you victory. It promises you that this moment isn't the end, but the start of a different fight, one where your tools work.

So the next time you're on your back on the mat, with someone heavier on top of you, and you feel "I'm losing" rising in your throat, remember what I tell every beginner: you're not losing. You're in guard.

See you on the mat,

Professor Itay Leibovich

The Israeli Academy of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA, 29 Yitzhak Sadeh Street, Tel Aviv