Great stuff from a Chicago-area practitioner.

The biggest take away is to maintain 4 points of contact while you’re in guard. Feet and hands are generally the first line of defense, but shins, forearms, knees and elbows count, too. While we’ve been working De la Riva in class for the last 2 weeks I’ve attended, it still counts as an open guard and needs those 4 points of contact to function well.

When my guard got passed a number of times in the last class I had lost 1 or more of those points and probably should have just adjusted to something else that allowed me to bring another point of contact into play. That might not always be possible, depending on what’s going on, but at least it gives me a goal.