Last week, BJJ black belt Keenan Cornelius released a video where he discredited the classic way of opening closed guard: knee in the middle, isolate a leg and push back.
Keenan stated:
“The way that your instructor taught you was wrong. This pass doesn’t work…”
This is the way that all BJJ practitioners have been taught.
7x black belt world champion Saulo Ribeiro also opens the guard like this and has done so at the highest level. The difference with the way he teaches it and what Keenan was criticising, is that Saulo doesn’t wedge his knee in the middle, he puts on the side of the b*ttcheek and he also puts his body sideways, opening the opponent’s legs with his back.
Cornelius says that this pass doesn’t work because he says that there is an easy way to counter it. But you can see that with the way Saulo does it, that counter is very difficult to do:
Keenan explains his concept in this video:
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