Mini Ep. 6: Frames

Hey, everybody. Before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Robert Nackie from Island Top Team in BGJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient Jujitsu mindset. It's part of BGJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BGJ Mental Models.com/beta. I will give you a free month. You can check out the course and if you decide that, it's not worth your money. You can cancel. You won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of Jujitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Hey, welcome to BGJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BGJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jujitsu approach. And I'm back again with this week's mini episode. Now, in the first five, we introduced Rob Bernackie's alignment framework and the various bits and pieces of that. I really recommend if you haven't listened to that series yet, go back and do it because we talk about alignment a lot. It's a very good base way to understand the mechanics of Jujitsu. And I really think that it's a great place to start if you're new to conceptual or mental model thinking in BGJ. So again, I do suggest going back and listening to many episodes one through five, but today we're moving on past alignment and we're going to start talking about the various core mechanics of Jujitsu. So in Jujitsu, in terms of actual body mechanics, and what we do with our limbs and our torso and our head, we can really distilled us down into some very simple ideas. And ultimately, every technique that you do, every position you hold is just a combination of these ideas. Today, what I want to talk about is frames. Now, for those who haven't really thought deeply about frames, I am sure at some point an instructor has told you to get frames. And at a base level, you probably understand a frame is something that you put between yourself and your opponent, but there's actually a lot more to it than that. A frame is really just an obstacle that you are putting up to manage the distance between yourself and your opponent. It's primarily going to be a defensive structure. Often where you're using frames is someone is coming at you and you are trying to prevent them from closing the space. You want to keep space for yourself. That's the main use case for a frame. And that's why you hear people talk about frames so much from inferior positions like bottom side control. But that said, frames come up everywhere in Jujitsu. They're really just a good distance management tool. A frame can be really any part of your body that you can use as a barrier. That can be your arms, your legs. These will be the most common pieces that you use. You can even use your head as a frame. Now, of course, the trick with frames is you need to make sure that when you're using frames, they are both effective and they're safe. And that's important to understand because a frame by itself is not necessarily a good strategy. Like, let me give you an example. If you are mounted on me and I use my hand to push against your face and I straight arm, I stiff arm to try to move your face away, I am framing against your face. But that's not a good strategy because my arm now is exposed. It's something that you can attack. So a good frame is a frame that is hard to attack. And there's a few points to that. I mean, there's different ways that you can frame with your arms and your legs. You can straight arm or straight leg. You can also frame with your forearm. For example, bottom side control. A lot of popular framing options from there involve using your forearms and part of the reason why is because if you're on bottom side control, it can be risky to fully extend your arm sometimes. Another thing to bear in mind with frames is that not all frames are equally solid. So as an example, if I straight arm you, I try to push you away with just my my complete arm, that's a jointed frame. I've got a joint in a stiff arm frame and that joint is my elbow. Actually, I have several joints because I've also got my wrist and those frames can collapse. You may have had this happen to you. I know I have had it happen to myself where someone is trying to pass my guard and I stiff arm. I stick my arm out and I try to put it on their hip to slow down their pass. That's a very common thing that a lot of people do. I strongly discourage people from trying to block a guard pass by straight arming on the hip. And part of the reason why is because that is not a solid frame. If the person on top hip switches or changes the angle, all of their weight is going to be applied against the weak parts of your arm, like your elbow or your wrist. And you can get injured that way. I have injured my wrist before because I tried to stiff arm someone against their hip, the hip switched and I wrist locked myself. So that can happen. That's an important thing to understand is that not all frames are good frames. They have to be frames you can apply safely. So again, a lot of the frames that you will see involve keeping things like elbows tight, or if you're using your leg as a frame, using more of the shin and trying to make sure they can't control your knee. Part of the reason why is because if I'm framing with my forearm, that's generally going to be a more solid frame than if I stiff arm. And that's simply because my elbow isn't part of the frame anymore. It's just a more solid structure. Now that said, that does not mean that stiff arming, straight arming, straight ligging is always bad. There are times to do that. The trick is if I'm going to stiff arm you, I need to make sure that I'm doing so in such a way that is safe for me. I cannot allow you if I'm stiff arming to be in a position to grab my arm, I don't want you to counter grip. And I also have to make sure that if you start changing the angle, I have the ability to match that angle so that my frame doesn't just collapse. A great example of a frame in the real world is a kickstand. A kickstand is just a tiny piece of metal, but it can hold up a motorcycle if it's at the right angle. And if you've ever ridden a bike or a motorcycle, then you know this. Sometimes you go to put out the kickstand, but you don't lock it all the way, it's off by just a few angles, and then it just collapses and the bike falls over. The lesson there is that at the correct angle, even a small tiny structure can hold up a lot of weight. But as soon as that angle becomes compromised, then the frame here in this case is no longer useful. It's probably just going to collapse. So if you are stiff arming or straight arming or creating a frame where the angle really matters, it's important that you understand the angle of force that's coming in, and you match it. Robert Nackie calls this force vectors. Effectively what he's saying is understand the direction that the force is coming in at and make sure that you match that direction. So if the force is coming one way, but your frame is at a different angle, it's not meeting that force directly. There's a good chance that your frame just collapses. On the other hand, if you put all your body weight down on me, and I frame at exactly the correct angle to match all of that incoming force, I can probably hold you. The trick is, of course, the person on top knows this, and so they're going to be constantly trying to change angles. And you see this a lot with guard passing, for instance. The person on the bottom is framing, framing, framing. They're trying to retain their guard. The person on top is trying to keep moving their hips and changing angles so that those frames are never directly aligned with the incoming force. Because as soon as you can find an angle as the guard passer, that is different from those frames. You can just slice right through the guard and pin the person. So that's really a good way to think about how frames work is making sure that you're matching the direction and the vector of incoming force. I don't want to make the sound too sciencey because I am certainly not a scientist, but that's basically the idea is match the angle in the direction of the incoming force. And again, beyond that, the other thing with frames is understanding that not all frames are good frames. If a frame has a lot of joints or points of weakness in it, or if it's something that the opponent could easily grab and latch onto, then it's not a safe frame for you to be using. I generally like to play a very conservative game with my frames. That means I'm often keeping my elbows in tight, my knees in tight, and I'll be doing a lot of framing with my forearms, but that's really just a style. There are a lot of people who have a lot of success with stiff arm frames or by straightening their legs, but that's kind of a very specific thing. So again, while you use frames, they're mostly going to come up in a defensive position because in many defensive positions, you're trying to make space. Let's talk about the next bit though. Something that Robert Nackie always says is when is a frame, not a frame. The answer is when it becomes a lever, or from my American friend's lever, but I'm Canadian, so I'm calling it lever. And we're going to talk about levers in the next episode. The relationship between levers and frames is very important to understand if you want to know how to win grip fights or advanced positions in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I hope this was a good primer on how frames work. If you want to learn more about what frames are, we have a whole episode that we did on frames on the BJJ Mental Models main feed. I will link that in the podcast notes to make it easy for people to find, but if you want to deeper dive into more in-depth conversation into how to use frames in Jiu-Jitsu, just check the show notes and you'll find it there. And of course, if you want the rest of our stuff, BJJMentalModels.com is where everything we make goes. That's where the podcast is. Getting close to 300 episodes at this point on the main feed alone, we've also got a lot of bonuses and specials, and of course, these mini episodes. All of that's entirely free. There's no advertisements other than me telling you how great our premium service is. You can also get our free newsletter over 10,000 strong there. And of course, if you want to support us, BJJMentalModels premium lives there too. So all of that said, BJJMentalModels.com. This is the first episode here of a series I want to do on the core mechanics of Jiu-Jitsu. Hope you found this conversation about frames useful and we will talk about levers in the next one. See you soon.