Position Before Submission: The Most Important Principle in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

By Professor Itay Leibovich | 3rd-Degree Black Belt, Gracie Jiu Jitsu | September 2026

At the end of a regular evening class in Tel Aviv, one of our beginners came out of a sparring round with a veteran student, sat down by the wall and said the sentence I have been hearing for years: "I almost submitted him! I caught his arm, one more second and he would have tapped!"

I asked him: "And where were you when you caught the arm?"

Silence. Eyes to the floor. "Inside his guard."

"Then you did not almost submit him," I told him. "You had a dream. And he took it from you, along with your back."

Welcome to the most important lesson in jiu jitsu. It is not a technique. It is not a secret move. It is three words that hang in the air of every serious academy in the world: Position Before Submission. And if you truly understand it, your game will not be the only thing that changes. The way you make decisions in life will look different too. A black belt's promise.

Three Words That Explain the Whole System

Let us break down this old saying, which long ago became the guiding principle of jiu jitsu: before you try to end the fight, get control. First reach a position where you are safe and your opponent is under pressure, and only then, from that stability, start looking for the submission. Not the other way round. Never the other way round.

Sounds almost banal, right? Like "look both ways before you cross". But here is the thing: almost everyone who starts training does exactly the opposite. The beginner sees a free arm and lunges at it. Sees an exposed neck and hangs on it. He wants to "win" so badly that he gives up everything he has for one submission. Then he loses, and does not understand why.

The difference between a beginner and an advanced practitioner in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is not the number of techniques. Believe me, I have seen enough white belts who can "explain" twenty submissions from YouTube. The difference is priorities. The advanced student knows something the beginner has not yet internalised: a submission is not something you take by force. It is something your opponent gives you, when he has no choice. And he only reaches the point of having no choice after he has lost the position.

Why a Submission Without Control Is Really a Gamble

Let us understand the mechanism, because once you see it, you will not be able to stop seeing it.

When you attempt a submission from a weak position, you are making a bad deal: you pay with something stable (your grip, your frame, your balance) for something uncertain (maybe he will not escape). If the gamble fails, and most of the time it fails against someone who knows what he is doing, you are left with nothing: no submission, no position, and quite often with someone on your back, in side control or in mount on top of you. Exactly what happened to our beginner.

When you reach a submission from control, the deal is completely reversed. You risk nothing. The choke attempt failed? You are still there, stable, and your opponent has burned energy defending. You try again. And again. Every escape attempt of his opens a new door. From the point of view of the person underneath, it is the most frustrating feeling in the sport: every move he makes only makes things worse.

Xande Ribeiro, a multiple-time world champion and one of the greats of his generation, put it in a way I love to quote to advanced students: "Catch him between the movements." You do not hunt your opponent when he is ready. You hunt him in the moment between his decisions. Between his movements. Between his escapes. Between his attacks. And to be there, patient and stable, you need a position. You cannot lie in wait for someone when you yourself are drowning.

A classic example from the mat: the very same submission, an armbar, can be two completely different moves. Attempted recklessly from the guard, without breaking his posture first, it is a gamble that usually ends with him pulling free and passing your legs. The exact same movement from an established mount, after the opponent has already been squeezed and pushed with his hands, is almost a technicality. The technique is identical. What changed? Only the position it came from. That is the whole story.

Think this sounds like chess? You are not far off. There too, you can sacrifice any piece except the king. Only here, the king is you, and the board is your body.

The Positional Hierarchy: The Map Every Beginner Needs on the Wall

To talk about position, you need a map. In jiu jitsu there is a clear hierarchy of positions, a ladder that everyone climbs every session, in both directions.

At the bottom of the ladder is the one being controlled: someone is sitting on you (mount), pinning you from the side (side control), or worst of all, on your back. In the middle is the guard: the position most identified with jiu jitsu, the state where you are on your back but your legs are between you and your opponent, defending, attacking, turning "bottom" into "dangerous". And at the top of the ladder: you are the one who passed the legs, you are on the side, you are in mount, you are on your opponent's back.

Let us feel the ladder from the inside for a moment, because words do not do it justice. Side control, when held properly, feels to the person underneath like a piano fell on him: the chest is locked, the breathing gets shorter, and the hands are suddenly busy surviving instead of attacking. A good mount feels like sitting on a rubber dinghy at sea: every wave your opponent creates, you simply ride. And the back? The back is the position where your opponent fights a shadow. He cannot see you, does not know where the next hand is coming from, and all he has left is guessing. Anyone who has ever been on the wrong side of each of these positions understands why the veterans are willing to work for whole minutes just to get there.

And this is not just training-mat theory. The competition scoring system is built precisely on this ladder: a guard pass is worth 3 points, mount 4, taking the back 4. The whole sport is built so that whoever climbs the ladder wins, before a single joint is locked. Why? Because whoever wrote the rules understood what the saying means: control is the victory. The submission is just the signature.

And if you are completely new to this world and all these words sound like Chinese (or Portuguese) to you, start with the basic guide I wrote: what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu actually is. After that, everything here will click.

The Gracie Philosophy: First, Do Not Lose

This principle was not born in competitions. It was born somewhere far more serious: self-defence.

The logic of Gracie Jiu Jitsu, from the days of the Gracie family in Brazil, is built as a pyramid of priorities. First of all, survive: do not get hit, do not get broken, do not panic. Then escape bad positions and improve your position. Then get control. And only at the end, when everything is safe, finish. Notice what sits at the base of the pyramid and what sits at the tip: the submission is the top floor, not the foundation.

This is exactly why the system works for smaller people against bigger ones. Someone stronger than you can absorb his own mistakes; you cannot. Your only advantage is the correct order of actions. Helio Gracie, one of the central figures in the development of the system, was light and thin compared to most of the people he faced, and built his game on precisely this principle: do not take risks, do not rush, control first. If the family's story interests you, I wrote about it at length in the post what Gracie Jiu Jitsu is.

And what about real self-defence, off the mat? There the principle is doubly critical. On the street there is no referee and no points, and what "wins" is not an impressive submission but control of the situation: staying on your feet or being the one on top, neutralising, buying time, getting out safely. A woman who has learned to control the position can decide; a woman who gambles on "one winning strike" depends on luck. This is true for men, and it is especially true in the world of women's self-defence, where size differences are the starting point, not the rare scenario.

What It Looks Like in Training, and Why It Is the Hardest Part for Beginners

In our classes in Tel Aviv, at the academy at 29 Yitzhak Sadeh Street, there is a drill that beginners do not always understand at first: positional sparring. It is a drill you will find in every serious jiu jitsu academy in the world, and yet it surprises every new intake. You start from a given position, say side control, and one person has a single task, to hold and advance, and the other has a single task, to escape. No submissions at all. Anyone who arrives expecting "let's play catch-the-arm" feels like dessert has been taken away.

And then, after a few months, the penny drops. The guy who spent two months doing nothing but mount escapes suddenly discovers that nobody can hold him. The woman who worked all week on guard passes discovers she is getting to everyone's side, and the submissions... the submissions are suddenly there, waiting for her, without her chasing them. That is the moment a student turns from a collector of tricks into the ruler of the game.

Saulo Ribeiro, a world champion who wrote one of the sport's most important instructional books, described the chain of failure of someone who acts without the right order: "If you think, you are late. If you are late, you use strength. If you use strength, you tire. And if you tire, you die." Position is what buys you the time to think before everyone else. Without it you are always late, always compensating with strength, always the first to tire.

And here lies the annoying beauty of the gentle art: the principle demands that you give up instant gratification. Hold back. Choose stable boredom over dangerous brilliance. Why is that so hard for us? Because it goes against instinct. I wrote about this beautiful difficulty in the post why they say the gentle art is so hard, and the answer there begins exactly here.

The Three Stages Every Student Goes Through (Check Where You Are)

After years of teaching, studying and coaching, I can sketch the path of almost every student in relation to this principle. Three stages, and none of them can be skipped.

Stage one: the hungry hunter. Anything that moves, he jumps on it. Arm, leg, neck, does not matter. His sparring looks like a puppy chasing three frisbees at once. He is exhausted after two minutes, loses every position he gains, and is convinced the problem is that he "does not know enough submissions". He learns another submission from YouTube. It does not help. (This is the stage Carlson Gracie once described with his famous brutality: you know a thousand moves, and you are bad at all of them.)

Stage two: the builder. Something breaks in him, usually after a few months of frustration, and he starts playing differently. Suddenly he gives up dubious submissions. Suddenly he counts "how long I held side control" instead of "how many submissions I got". His jiu jitsu game becomes boring from the outside and fascinating from the inside. This is the stage where most of the people around him start losing to him, and he is not even trying to win.

Stage three: the patient hunter. The stage where the two things connect. He builds position like the builder, but lies in wait like the hunter. He does not chase the submission and does not give up on it; he invites it. Applies pressure in exactly the measure that will make the opponent make a mistake, then harvests the fruit of that mistake. From the outside it looks like magic. From the inside it is a sequence of actions repeated so many times it has become second nature. Or first.

The good news: moving between the stages is not a matter of talent. It is a matter of understanding and of mileage on the mat. And the moment you read this post, you already got a shortcut to stage two.

The Mistake Everyone Makes, and How to Spot It in Yourself

How do you know you are sinning against the principle? There is one simple sign: count how many times in sparring you lose a good position because you tried to submit too early. With beginners it happens almost every round, and it is just one of the mistakes I put on my list of the five common beginner mistakes.

The real culprit is almost always the ego. A submission feels like a victory you can tell people about; "I held side control for three minutes" does not sound impressive on Instagram. So people chase the story instead of the control. But the mat, unlike Instagram, is not impressed by stories. In the end, whoever controls wins, and whoever gambles pays. "The mat does not lie."

There is also a flip side, which I think is important to say out loud: the principle is not an excuse for cowardice. Some students get stuck in eternal "control" and never risk anything, and that is a mistake too, because that is how you never learn to finish. The right formula is order, not avoidance: first build the house, then open the door. Whoever builds and never opens has built a bunker.

Position Before Submission, Even at Eight in the Morning at the Office

I will tell you something I learned after years on the mat: this principle seeps through. It leaves the gym with you and goes home.

Think about a salary negotiation. The "lunge at the arm" version is demanding a raise on your boss's bad day, without preparation, because you feel like it now. The position-before-submission version is building six months of standing: documented results, relationships, a real alternative in hand. Then the conversation itself, like the submission, almost happens by itself. Think about an argument at home: you can "win" a ping-pong of jabs and burn the whole evening, or you can first get to a position of calm and then talk. Same principle. Same order. In that sense, an hour and a half of jiu jitsu in the evening is training in decision-making no less than it is physical training. The body learns patience, and the head discovers that it pays.

And if you are a parent, you will find the principle in education too, in the least expected place. A child who wants a new bike "now!" learns from you, without words, how things are obtained: either by a tantrum in a moment of your weakness (a submission from a weak position, works (maybe) once and ruins everything afterwards), or by building a case over time: responsibility, chores, trust. When I explain to parents why our children's classes are built on patience and gradual progress rather than "tricks", I am really explaining these three words.

And that, by the way, is what answers the question parents ask me: "What will my child learn there besides fighting?" He will learn exactly this. That shortcuts are the long way. That whoever builds a base discovers the result arrives almost by itself. Some lessons are hard to teach in words, so we teach them through the body.

Questions That Keep Coming Up About the Principle

What does Position Before Submission mean, in plain terms?

First reach a dominant, stable position, and only then try to finish with a submission. Do not sacrifice control for a premature finishing attempt. It is the central tactical principle of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and it holds for the beginner on day one and for the black belt after twenty years.

Does that mean beginners are not allowed to attempt submissions?

Absolutely not. You try, you fail and you learn, that is the way. The idea is a priority order, not a ban: when you have a chance to improve your position and a chance to attempt a dubious submission, choose the position. And in our classes you can always ask the instructor "should I have gone for that?", that is what we are there for. Just as important: when someone has caught you, simply tap and start again. I wrote a whole post on why the tap is your best friend.

What is the strongest position?

At the top of the ladder is back control: your opponent cannot see you, cannot hit you, and every option is yours. Right after it comes the mount. But a coach's real answer is different: the strongest position is the one you know how to hold. A mount you lose after one second is worth less than a side control you can keep for a minute.

How do you practise it in reality?

Positional sparring (you start from a given position and work only on control and escape), systematic work on escapes, and deliberate play in sparring: give yourself position tasks instead of counting submissions. That is the heart of training in our jiu jitsu classes, and progress in it is far more measurable than it seems. And if you have not started training at all yet, this is what your first class with us looks like, with no inflated expectations.

Is the principle relevant to self-defence?

More than anywhere else. In a real confrontation there is no referee to stop it, so control beats gambling in every situation. The goal in self-defence is first of all not to get hurt: to control the distance, the situation and the angle, and to get out safely. That is the foundation we teach in the women's groups too, and anyone coming from a background of women's Krav Maga courses recognises the difference in approach very quickly: fewer scenarios, more live control against real resistance. I expanded on this in the guide to women's self-defence.

Does it work in MMA too?

Unequivocally. In MMA the price of a bad position is even higher, because strikes enter the picture, so the rule gets sharper: a submission from a weak position against someone who is allowed to hit you is a recipe for trouble. The great world champions build control first, and the finish arrives as a by-product. More on the relationship between the two worlds in the post MMA vs BJJ.

Does the principle exist in other martial arts too?

In different forms, yes. A good boxer works first on stance, distance and angle, and only then on the combination that finishes. A wrestler builds grips before a throw. But in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu the principle is not just another piece of good advice, it is the backbone of the entire system: the positional hierarchy, the scoring system, the structure of training, all derive from it. It is one of the things that make this sport a tactical school, not just a physical one.

How long does it take to internalise the principle?

To understand it in your head? Five minutes, you just finished. To internalise it in your body, so that it beats your instinct even under pressure? Months of training, and that is perfectly fine. Every sparring round in which you gave up a gamble and kept your position is a step. One day you will catch yourself stopping a moment before a reckless lunge, and you will smile under your mouthguard. That is the day you became a jiu jitsu student, not just someone who trains jiu jitsu.

Bottom Line: Stop Chasing, Start Building

Back to our beginner from the opening. A few months have passed since that evening. A week ago I saw him sparring with a newer beginner, one who chases every free arm exactly the way he once did. I watched him absorb the lunge, roll, settle into side control, and simply wait. Patient. Stable. Until the submission arrived at his door like registered mail.

After the round he caught my eye from the side of the mat and smiled. We did not say a word. We both knew exactly what had happened there.

So if there is one thing I want you to take from this post, it is the order: first the base, then the result. First control, then the finish. On the mat, at work, at home. And if you would rather feel it in your body than read about it, send us a WhatsApp message and come to a trial class. Arrive with no experience, no fitness and no knowledge, exactly like all of us once did. We will build the position together.

See you on the mat.

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