Footwork - Back Step

Words I Like - “Don’t chase space. Create angles with the pressure you already have.”

Outlier Mat Minute: Footwork - Back Step

When passing the guard, back steps are a great way to create angles while keeping pressure. Jozef Chen helped me see how useful they are—especially when your lead leg is stuck or you want to keep pressure with it:

• Loose Passing: By using a back step, we can keep pressure on the near leg of the guard player while we create an angle, making it hard for them to recover their near foot position.

  • Jozef Chen Example

  • Owen Jones Example

• Keep pressure with the lead leg: It’s easy to provide many examples of this, but the general rule is anytime you cannot move (or do not want to move) your lead leg, a back step is a good option.

  • Mica maintains pressure with his lead leg as he back steps to enter the leg drag

  • Craig cannot move his lead leg because of the false reap grip. He back steps to create angle into the leg drag.

  • The guard player has a grip on the leg of Andrew so he cannot use it, so he back steps.

  • When defending from K-Guard, it can be hard to move the primary leg but we can back step with the secondary leg.

As promised, jiu-jitsu insights in under 1 minute!

P.S. Using back steps to defend leg entanglements is a great use case!