It’s wonderful to be able to finally attend jiu jitsu seminars again, in this time of Covid-19 insanity. It’s been almost a year since I attended my last seminar. “Unprecedented times” is now a cliche, but it’s true.
Sonny Brown is a Lange’s MMA Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt first degree and MMA titleholder. He studies a wide variety of fighting systems. He has been a referee and an MMA fight commentator.
He has a breadth of fine content out on his YouTube channel, his podcast, The Sonny Brown Breakdown, Instagram, Facebook, and a personal website. Definitely a man to watch in the grappling ecosystem!
The scarf hold is also referred to as kesa gatame or headlock control.
The far arm is around the neck, the near arm controls his elbow.
There is a similar hold called the modified scarf hold, kuzure kesa gatame, or switchbase side control, where the far arm goes under the opponent’s armpit. The seminar is not concerned with that position, which has a different set of attacks and defenses. We are concerned with the regular scarf hold, or kesa gatame.
The position is a “ride”, from wrestling. We can use it to put the opponent and his ability to breathe effectively under considerable pressure, thus “cooking the fight”, wearing the opponent down. We have a number of attacks from here. Our hips are lifted slightly off the floor so that our partner carries as much of our weight as possible.
The first drill or game involves controlling your partner in kesa gatame without using grips, with closed fists, so that body positioning becomes important as a means of control.
Some jiu jitsu people claim that the scarf hold is a poor position as it offers your opponent and easy path to your back. If they can get their near elbow to the mat, this might be true. However, if you do it properly, this is by no means an easy task. The next game is to get the position and have your partner try to get his elbow to the mat, while you control his elbow and try to stop him.
You must keep their head under control – note how Sonny cups his right thigh with his right hand to leave his left hand free to control the near elbow, or, later, to attack. The near leg is stretched out in line with their spine, with the foot turned out. This effectively elongates his spine by over half a metre and makes his bridge attempts ineffectual – when they bridge, all they do is drive your near foot into the ground. Your far leg is bent and you are up on the toes, so you can follow him (as if skateboarding) and keep the alignment of your near leg and his spine, should he attempt to change the angle, plus you can keep your weight on him. As mentioned, your hips are slightly off the mat so he must carry as much of your weight as possible.
We look now at two common ways for your partner to escape kesa gatame. The first is the bridge and roll escape. If you are under kesa gatame, you are generally better off having your arms wrapped around his torso, your near arm under his far armpit, hands joined. Here your arms are safe (for the moment) from immediate attacks, and the bridge and roll escape is available.
To escape you cut an angle on your opponent so your spine is no longer aligned with his near leg. Get a tight grip around his torso and bridge him over you so he lands on his back.
Be sure to bridge him over the top of your chest. Trying to bridge him over your abdomen is working against yourself.
For drilling purpose, grab his head and elbow and switch base through so that you now have kesa gatame on him. He can then work his bridge and roll escape on you, swim through to kesa gatame, so you can both practice the escape in a continuous drill.
The second type of escape involves pushing on his chin or jaw with the far arm, or both arms, moving your feet away, and hooking his head with the back of your far leg. Drive his head toward the mat with the hooked leg, You have a good opportunity to grab his near arm, in reverse kimura (easy) or kimura (harder as it requires a hand switch, but leads straight into a kimura trap position with all its options), or to come to a top position.
Be careful here that he does not push your near arm across to the far side of his face and set up the head and arm choke from here (coming later).
To prevent the head push and leg over escape when you are on top, keep your head low and close to his. He is very unlikely to be strong enough to push your head away here.
Always move around, preventing him from cutting the angle he needs for the bridge and roll escape. If he attempts to hook your far leg with his far leg, take your far knee forward towards the mat and his head so he has no place to insert his hook.
We have a wider variety of attacks available if we can get his near arm in front of us, i.e. not tucked under our armpit with his hands joined around our back.
The first attack is an armlock, arguably a type of kimura, made while his arms are locked around our back. You slide your far forearm under his elbow, so that the place where your watch would go is under the elbow. your palm of this hand is pointed down. Turn the other palm up and join your hands in an S grip. Now lift his elbow up towards your head to apply the arm lock.
(John Will advocates sliding your hips down and forward under his arm, in effect “doing the limbo” under his arm. This applies a rotational effect to the shoulder more like the kimura of which this is a variant).
You may get a tap from the armlock here.
However, it is easy for him to relieve the armlock pressure by straightening his arm. This is fine, be prepared for this. Immediately he straightens his arm, quickly slip your near elbow over his arm so your elbow touches your thigh, his arm now tapped in front. It may be beneficial to come up on the toe of the far foot to reduce the size of the gap for him to try and get his arm back behind you. By keeping your elbow on your thigh and sliding it up and down, you should be able to easily thwart his attempts to hide his arm back behind you. When the opportunity presents itself, grab his arm between your thumb and fingers, thumb on the inside being the superior grip. You are now well placed for a variety of attacks on the captured arm.
If you can’t get that arm, the punch or no gi Ezekiel choke is still an available and very effective option.
The spot to aim your fist is the place between the trachea and the sternocleidomastoid muscle in the neck, the spot where you would place a finger to feel your heartbeat. Drive your knuckles into that spot, keep the bicep around his head tight so that you perform a blood choke or strangle between your fist and the other bicep. Try to bring your fist to your bicep with his neck in the middle.
This is pretty brutal, so be sparing in practice. For even more brutality, you could attack the trachea directly. Careful, the potential damage here is considerable.
Even threatening this attack may be enough to get him to bring his hands in front to try and stop it. Which is good for us.
You can play a game where the bottom person has his arms around your back and you use the armlock attack we learned earlier or the Ezekiel choke to get ihs near arm in front and grab it.
Here Sonny demonstrates a straight arm lock and the high percentage Americana type finish. For the latter, it really helps to bring the near leg (the one trapping his wrist) underneath you as you lift his head with your arms.
(If you can’t push his wrist to the ground, take it as far as you can and then lift the knee to hook the wrist. Be careful as some people do not have the shoulder flexibility and will be tapping well before you get everything locked in.)
There is another armlock option of he rolls his arm the other way.
The next game involves the top person having already grabbed the arm, and attempting to apply one of the above submissions, while the bottom person tries to get his arm out of the danger zone, or escape.
We now look to switch our legs, keeping very similar grips. This allows us new possibilities for an armbar, but its main utility is that it allows a head and arm choke if he has his hands held together, defending the arms. this is the Kesa Smash or Kesa Switch.
The Kesa Switch also allows us to move to regular side control with some tight upper body controls.
If you can get his near elbow across his body, you have the opportunity to drop your head down to the shoulder next to it, to apply the more standard head and arm choke. The classic opportunity for this as I was taught is when the bottom person pushed on your jaw with the near palm – parry his elbow to the side and the choke is there. The low position, with a few other positional tweaks, is called kata gatame, for which there are many other entries to and submissions from.
We now move into more catch wrestling territory with the Kesa Crush. This is mostly a chest compression with elements of neck and spinal cranks. Spinal cranks are illegal in IBJJF. As you hear me say from behind the camera, you could argue it is a choke but it is generally best to avoid grey areas and going up against the edges of the rules in competition – the referee may see the line between legal and illegal differently to the way you would like. Consider yourself warned.
That said, this is horribly effective. I think of it as bending the guy’s torso where it isn’t supposed to bend.
If the bottom person is slow bringing their legs toward you to get the angle to bridge and roll, or puts the near leg in reach of your far hand at any other time, you have the opportunity to overhook their far leg and apply the Bas Rutten Body Crunch. You want to have both hands grasping over your thighs, if you get the alignment right it should feel like you are sitting in a comfortable (for you, not him) armchair. Increase the pressure by bringing your knees together, thus also pulling your arms tighter.
This is a spinal crank, and as such is illegal under IBJJF rules.
To get the scarf hold, we need to be able to gain control of his near elbow, while preventing him from getting underhooks, etc. Opening his elbow is fundamental to many attacks, and your opponents should do their utmost to prevent it, making this a major challenge in jiu jitsu.
Here are a few other ways to get the position and extract the arms.
Sonny demonstrates a few other possibilities from the position, moving into leglocks, kimuras, side triangles, etc.
If you missed out on this seminar … you missed out!
Please keep an eye out for a forthcoming video on the Scarf Hold Suffocation System on BJJ Fanatics, and support Sonny Brown by buying it!
Sonny’s YouTube channel (which shows links to other platforms): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdnZMIvA8iuAc05jeL0o-2g
The Sonny Brown Breakdown podcast: https://www.sonnybrown.net/podcast