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Instructional Review: Marco Barbosa’s The Pressure Passing Manual

Instructional Review: Marco Barbosa’s The Pressure Passing Manual

There’s no easy way to learn how to pass the guard and improve your guard passing skills …

… but there are smart and effective methods to do so.

Knowing and using such methods will make a huge difference in your learning curve.

There’s one method I can recommend.

In the past you had to fly all the way to São Paulo, Brazil to learn this secret.

But not any more.

I’ll tell you more about it shortly.

For now … here’s a bit about my guard passing journey.

I started working on guard passing more extensively after I became a brown belt.

Not to brag, but to illustrate my point – as a purple belt, I probably did about 60 matches, won about 40 of them, and almost all by triangle choke from the guard.

But in training sessions, sometimes you really have to do your top game. Like in positional sparring.

When you get easily flipped over and over like a burger on a hot plate during positional sparring … by almost everyone who is bigger and stronger (and/or more skilled) than you …

Your soul gets crushed little by little.

BJJ is brutally honest like that.

My guard pass sucked and I was scared to admit it.

I was making a BS excuse to avoid learning how to pass the guard as well.

And you hear this excuse all the time – “I just go for submission”.

This is a bit tricky, because there’s seemingly nothing wrong with that.

In the long run though, this way of thinking can slow down your growth as a BJJ player, because you are justifying yourself about not getting out of your comfort zone.

I eventually opened up to the idea of improving my guard passing skills.

Here’s what I did to improve my guard passing skills:

I watched tons of instructional videos on guard passing, YouTube videos, and videos of my favorite BJJ players passing the guard in their matches.
Also I tried to figure out how my training partners would pass the guard, and to incorporate their tricks into my game. It’s basically reverse engineering.
And obviously I applied what I learned to sparring sessions.

These ways of learning help …

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You could accomplish this learning task in a shorter amount of time and with greater success.

Remember the “secret” method I mentioned to you earlier?

And that you had to fly all the way to São Paulo to learn this method … in the past?

Now you don’t have to be in São Paulo to learn it (though you should if you can afford it).

Because you can learn this secret method by watching Marco Barbosa’s “The Pressure Passing Manual”.

For those of you who don’t know, Marco Barbosa was a legendary Judo&BJJ player and raised world class competitors/instructors like Cicero Costha and Murilo Santana … and his gym in São Paulo is one of the most competitive gyms in the city.

In this instructional series, Barbosa helps you understand fundamental concepts & principles of guard passing AND gives you a complete roadmap to developing foundational skills.

These skills are practical applications of the concepts & principles you learn in the videos, and you can apply them to almost every guard passing scenario.

This is the kind of resource I wish I had when I started working on improving my guard passing skills … in fact, I wish this particular series were available when I started practicing BJJ.

Unlike the majority of BJJ instructional videos that show you particular moves without explaining the “why”s behind them, or that are too theoretical, Barbosa’s videos cover both theoretical and practical aspects of improving your guard passing skills.

You can see a bit of Barbosa’s pressure passing skills here:

The entire length of the videos are just about 2 hours.

That’s probably about an entire length of a single training session …

And you will learn pretty much everything you need to know to become a great guard passer in these 2 hours.

Of course, you will need to spend your time on the mat sharpening your guard passing skills …

And this process will be easy too, because Barbosa gives you all the essential drills you need to master his concepts & principles of guard passing.

These drills are the gem of his instructional videos.

He does show a couple of specific guard passing moves* as examples of how to apply his concepts and principles in a real situation, though his main focus is helping you understand these concepts and principles so you can apply them to your guard passing game.

(*The specific passes Barbosa shows are similar to Murilo Santana’s passes – Murilo Santana used to train under Marco Barbosa, so there’s no wonder obviously. If Barbosa’s teaching method can produce one of the best passers in the game like Murilo Santana, it can help you improve your guard passing game too.)

If you work on Barbosa’s drills, you will learn how to create and maintain heavy pressure all the way from the beginning to the mount position.

He covers transitions from the side control to the mount position as well as how to shift your body weight so you can keep the mount position … while making your opponent extremely uncomfortable.

Also, Barbosa goes over how to use the cross face and underhook control effectively as well as how to deal with your opponent’s underhook.

By practicing Barbosa’s drills, you will start understanding how pressure passing should be done and will be able to tell whether you’re on the right track or not when passing someone’s guard.

You can only develop this kind of intuition by teaching your body how to generate and maintain pressure, and also by understanding the foundational concepts & principles behind pressure passing.

I’m paraphrasing Barbosa’s words, but he explains that a huge difference between good players and excellent players is how many details they can apply to each move in a fraction of time.

Marco Barbosa’s “The Pressure Passing Manual” gives you these details AND helps you learn to apply them through his practical drills.

“The Pressure Passing Manual” is released by BJJ Fanatics only for $47 …

… when you consider the fact that you can learn Marco Barbosa’s secret method just by watching and applying this instructional series …

… and that you don’t have to fly all the way to São Paulo and learn from Barbosa himself (though that would be ideal) …

… $47 for this program should be a ridiculously reasonable price.

If you want to improve your guard passing skills further, you should check out “The Pressure Passing Manual” by clicking here.

Sloth Jiu-Jitsu: you can be slow and unathletic and still kick butt in Jiu-Jitsu.

Welcome to SLOTH Jiu-jitsu – the ultimate programme for conserving energy, utilising body weight and taking your time! An especially effective strategy for older or less athletic competitors, but suitable and highly recommended for all jiu-jitsu practitioners. 12 chapters taught in person by 3rd Degree BJJ Black Belt Gile Huni.