Revamp Your Berimbolo: 3 Tricks to Perfect Your Technique
Elevate Your Game with These 3 Essential Adjustments
We've witnessed too many great fights over the last week at the ADCC Trials, and I'm still watching and rewatching my favorite fighters' matches. There are so many exceptional bouts that it'll take me a while to distill the most important lessons (80/20 style) I'm learning as I watch.
Even though the ADCC Trials have been the focus of my viewing this week, and I've been solely concentrated on improving my ADCC-style wrestling over the past couple of months, I actually got sidetracked after the last Polaris event.
It's no secret that I am a fan of Jozef Chen, and his fights were great, but Levi Jones-Leary's performance is what truly stayed in my mind after the event. I always dismissed the berimbolo for modern no-gi grappling. And I have to admit that even though the berimbolo was my go-to move for my first couple of years of BJJ, I actually stopped using it completely a couple of years ago... until 2 weeks ago.
I became so obsessed with Levi's performance that I went back to watch all of his black belt fights and got super excited about playing with the berimbolo again.
I'll be honest, I was rusty after so many years of not using it. I play a lot of worm guard and reverse de la worm, which means I am used to inverting in a boloesque fashion, but always with the safety of the lapel.
So I decided to stop using the lapel so I could really troubleshoot my berimbolo and eventually migrate it to a no-gi environment.
I did a lot of research, and in the end, the best resource I found was a 6-year-old video of Lachlan explaining the most basic mistakes and how to fix them.
Here are my notes on the most common Berimbolo mistakes and how to fix them (based on Lachlan's video, of course)
Mistake #1: Bad Shin Positioning
In order to make sure you invert right under your opponent's legs and hips, you need to ensure your hips are super close to your opponent's while you invert. I was taught to use my shin on their abdomen, but I was never too close, and I had to crab-ride my opponent's legs to be able to get close to the back.
The fix is actually quite simple: instead of putting your shin on their abdomen, place your thigh and knee. This will bring you much closer to them and help you get under their hips instead of under their lower legs:
Mistake #2: Not Lifting Their Hips Off the Mat
The next confession I need to make is that I was managing to invert and get under them, but I was almost always getting to a sort of leg-drag position and not getting to the back:
And the mistake was very easy to fix. I was trying to expose their back instead of lifting their hips off the mat, which eventually creates more back exposure than just frantically reaching for the back.
The trick is not to face them, but to make your hips face away from them, dragging their hips up and off the mat with your hips:
Mistake #3: Pushing the Leg Away
This next one is kind of contradictory to the previous one, but for some reason, I've been applying both at certain times, and the use of both has fixed most of my berimbolos.
A lot of times, I would end up doing this, and the previous mistake fix wouldn't work to lift their hips off the mat:
The fix was also super simple... If I mix the idea from the previous mistake (#2: Hips facing away) and force their knee to go towards their head instead of away from their body, I can almost always get the hips off the mat:
Look at it in motion:
Conclusion
These 3 things fixed my berimbolo in a matter of hours. I strongly recommend that you watch Lachlan's original video and come back to these notes as you troubleshoot and fix your berimbolo.
In the future, I plan to send a study on using the berimbolo in no-gi and as a counter to leglocks.
Here's Levi performing a berimbolo.. try to catch all the 3 solutions we covered:
And here's a highlight reel of some amazing berimbolos:
Amazing Berimbolos Highlight Reel
Hope it helps!
Enrique