The De La Pages Guard « Genesis Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts!

The De La Pages Guard

07Jan07

I’ve been playing around and working on a guard that has been working wonders for me. Especially against much bigger guys. And I just wanted to share it with you guys and gals and see what your thoughts were on my game. Just for clarification purposes, I’m not claiming to have invented anything mind blowing or revolutionary, it’s just something that has been working for me that I haven’t seen anyone do. As for the name and the naming conventions that you will be noticing, I attribute that to Eddie Bravo and the SBGi group. In my opinion, terming techniques helps me to remember them and refer back to them much easier than calling it one big long sentence.

Just to give you a back ground on how and why I came up with this guard (I’m pretty sure no one really plays their guard like this. I’ve maybe seen one person but he did not rely on it as a means for attacking from the guard) was because of 3 reasons. One, I switched gyms; Two, the new gym is predominately a no-gi school and a large part of my game relied on the gi to break my opponents posture and hold them down; Three, I I lost a lot of weight! About 50 lbs.! So, with that being said, I wasn’t too comfortable and I didn’t have me way with people the way I used to.

So, this guard started, or at least the idea spawned from a modified sitting up guard I used to play. Without a gi this game was shot to $h17! As time went on, my new coach advocated a two on one grip. This is nothing new, but I personally feel it is something new in regards to guard playing. So, I took the idea and started to play my guard with the constant idea of a two on one grip. Then the De La Pages Guard was born.

The De La Pages (Pronounced Pahes. The “G” in Spanish is pronounced as an “H”) Guard name came about because I was such a big fan of De La Riva, his guard, and his game all together. I admired De La Riva. I guess you can say naming this guard the way I did was some what of a tribute or a compliment to De La Riva. So, I still continued to play with the name and others as well such as the “J” Guard or the 2 on 1 guard and eventually I decided to stick with “De La Pages”!

Again, for clarification, my last name is not De La Pages, it’s just Pages! I merely thought it had a nice ring to it. So I convinced my self to keep the name due to the fact that “De La” is a common name of people with Spanish decent. The literal translation of De La is “of the”. So, this was another convincing factor for me. Simply, in English, the De La Pages Guard would translate to of the Pages Guard. So, I liked it and I stuck with it.

The De La Pages Guard is my bread and butter. It’s my fail-safe guard that I feel most comfortable and the guard in which I feel most in control. It transitions very well into other guards such as closed, open, z, and butterfly, but more specifically it transitions very well into the rubber guard or any other high guard games. I feel that this game or guard was very helpful in the evolution of my game moving into strictly no-gi. It has also helped me tremendously in controlling my opponent and I now feel the same confidence in the control that I had with a gi.

This is just a little taste of what’s to come in this section of my blog. I will be sharing different guard positions, submissions, sweeps, and other things you can do from this guard. This is a game I’ve developed for my self and it has worked for me and I certainly hope it would work for you.

Stay Tuned!