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A while back I learned a double threat attack from side control. This consisted of a kimura and arm bar combination that attacks the far side arm. I pretty much forgot how to do it and then we went over it again in class on Wednesday.

Let’s suppose we’ve got our opponent in standard side control as opposed to something like Kesa Gatame. If we start to wrap the neck or attack the far side arm, there’s a good chance our opponent will take his far side arm and reach up across your back. If he does this, it will leave a great opportunity for us to attack with a double threat.

The first thing is to trap the far side arm with our arm closest to our opponent’s head. We can help secure the arm by grabbing our lapel. Make sure the arm is nice and secure and that you’re below the elbow so he can’t simply slide it out.

Once we’ve got the arm secure, we want to pull him onto his side slightly. We can help accomplish this by switching our hips to more of a Kesa position. So rather than being on our knees, we’re gonna sit out. This hip switch will help to prop our opponent up further.

Once we’ve got him propped up, we’re going to step over his head with our near leg. We want to keep all of our movements nice and tight to avoid creating space.

Now we want to place our free hand on the ground to help our base as we turn our body towards the feet. We want to drive our opponent’s trapped arm down in front of us so we can then grab the wrist with our free hand and then take our hand that is attached to our lapel and grab our other wrist for the kimura lock.

Now we’re in position to attack with either the kimura or with the arm bar.

1. To finish with the kimura, we’re gonna want to keep our opponent propped on his side, but we’re gonna reposition our legs for better leverage.

   The leg that is on the same side as our own body is going to step into his arm pit area to help keep his free arm from pulling into his side where he’ll have more strength to resist our attack. And with the leg that previously stepped over his head, we’re going position it closer to his back as a form of kickstand.

   We should have our opponent nice and tight now between our legs so he can’t turn either way. And we’re gonna weight him down as well to add further pressure.

   Now we’re going to take up the slack in his arm by pulling the bent arm down and into us. The pressure will come from rotating his hand away from us.

2. Finishing with the arm bar is a little bit smoother once we have stepped over our opponent’s head.

   From there, we’ve got our opponent turned up on his side. We’ve got our head-side leg stepped over and placing pressure on his head. And we should basically be sitting on him at this point.

   Now we want to basically pivot our body to finish the arm bar. But we don’t want to create space for him to turn into us. So we’re basically gonna pivot on our butt so that we can simply slide down his back. If we need to, we can turn him on his side more so that we’re really tight when we slide down.

   Our one leg should naturally be across his head. But the leg we previously used to step over his head with could block us from finishing things. We don’t really want to step over his head to get into position. Instead, by moving our foot closer to his body, we should be able to sit and keep our knee up. The closer our foot is to his body, the easier it will be to sit without trapping our own foot under us and the tighter our two knees will be around the arm for a really solid arm bar.

While the arm bar is the easier of the two to finish, the reason for using the double threat is to give us options and to keep our opponent guessing.

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arm bar, BJJ, darkhorse, kimura, mike young, side control