Fly like an eagle
In my opinion, Khabib ‘The Eagle’ Nurmagomedov is the best MMA fighter on the planet right now. His undefeated record and ability to absolutely nullify his opponents have been a very impressive feat in the UFC. His techniques appear to be simple yet yields some of the best results. After watching many of his fights, I have incorporated some of his systems into my game. In this blog, I will be going through one aspect of his style that has helped me in my MMA journey.
When I say that my style is like Khabib’s, I do not mean that I’m in any shape or form at his level, or nearly as effective. Rather, I am referring to the kind of movements and principles that guide his techniques. Khabib is economical with his movements, incorporating relatively basic moves to dominate his opponents – which is my goal. He is a takedown to ground-and-pound guy and in MMA, this is what I like to do. This is one aspect of his game that I use in mine and find very useful.
The photo above demonstrates the usual position for half guard. The person on the ground/bottom has his bottom leg wrapped around your leg that is closest to him. In this photo, it is his right leg around my right leg.
The above photo shows what Khabib likes to do. He likes to have his opponent’s top leg locked between his legs on the ground. Unlike traditional half guard, this does not allow your opponent to roll to their back, get an under hook or deep half guard which are all standard defences from the bottom. When you have someone in this position and you start the ground-and-pound, all they can really do is turn to their belly and get to their knees. By locking the top leg, you’re trying to lock their hips as well, making it very hard to move. One of the tricks to keeping them from getting their hips away and pulling their legs away is to be stay at 90 degrees to the person on the ground. This keeps their top leg bent and makes it harder to get that leg free. When you’re there, you want to be thinking about keeping their head as close to your hips as possible. Naturally, they will try and move away. However, the more you keep their leg bent, and their leg close to them while also thinking about keeping your hips closer to their head, the better success you will have keeping them in place. The longer you keep their leg bent and stay close to their head, the longer you will keep this position. Due to the punishment they take from ground-and-pound and how dominated they feel, the person on the bottom will roll to their knees sooner or later.
Once they get to their knees, you keep their leg between your knees and start throwing punches to their head. This makes them bring their hands to protect their head. You drive your hips forward so all the weight goes on their top arm. In the photo I am driving him forward from his left hip (bottom left corner of his body) which transfers his weight to his right arm (top right corner of his body). This allows you to reach through with your left hand and grab their right wrist. Since their weight is on that arm, if they move it, they will fall over. This opens up the right side of his head from more ground-and-pound. As they are trying to both defend punches and keep their balance with one arm, one of those is going to fail. In most cases, people will lose balance over getting punched in the head. You keep driving your hips forward and before you know it, they’re flat on the ground.
After you’ve flattened them out, they will usually roll to their side where they find themselves in the same position as where we started. If they roll the other way (turning away from you) they will have given you their back. There is also one added bonus. Now you have an arm controlled as well. This makes the person feel even more helpless and you can repeat the process until one of two things happen: the round ends or the fight is stopped.
This is a video of the process repeating, the punches are not hard as it is just a demo, but you will get the idea.
After working this position for a little while, I found a couple of ways to get the top leg for the Khabib half guard. One is to put on some ground-and-pound in side-control to distract them from their top leg so you can get it. This can be hard against talented opponents especially if they know what you are up too. Another way is just to keep top position and if the opportunity comes to get the leg, then take it. However, I find the easiest and most successful way to get this position is when your opponent is on all fours – you trap a leg between your legs, get wrist control and hip drive.
This little combo of positions has a massive effect on your opponent. There is almost nothing else in MMA that I have used that demoralises, zaps energy and takes belief away from your opponent like this combo. It gives you an insight into how effective Khabib is as he goes through his opponents with apparent ease. Against top strikers he takes them down and destroys them with ground-and-pound. Against top grapplers, he takes them down and nullifies their grappling and destroys them with ground-and-pound. Khabib does not do anything that seems difficult, he makes it look like you and I can do what he does. If we tried to do what he does against the level of fighter he competes against I think you would find that we would struggle at the very least. Somehow he makes dominating a top fighter look easy and normal and that is why I see him as the top fighter on the planet right now.
Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor