Jailton Almeida, Low Mount, And Using Grappling For More Than Submissions

Where’s Your Weight?

When I started training mixed martial arts I was lucky enough to meet TUF 1 veteran Chris Sanford. Sanford has the unfortunate distinction of being voted off the show and eventually losing to Josh Koschek in the UFC. I remember him as a martial arts savant. 

Every time I spoke with Sanford he gave me a new nugget of training wisdom, martial arts theory, or general insight into the fight game. Maybe my teenage self inflated his wisdom, or maybe my memory has pedastalized him. I don’t really care because that dude had one of the heaviest mounts I ever felt and he helped me with mine. 

When I asked Sanford how his mount was so heavy he pointed my white belt eyes to Roger Gracie, adaptive mounts, and the importance of weight distribution in grappling.

Like many people I saw mount as a position predicated on getting all the way in. You need a high mount to attack submissions and that’s where my thinking stopped. While that is true, you can’t be so focused on high mount that you ignore everything before.

Sanford pointed out that the best mounters in the world know how to adapt their mount to prevent escapes before they even begin. He explained that you need to be all the way in to attack, low to cook your opponents, and the middle zone is a no man’s land that benefits the bottom player’s escape attempts. Your legs’ job is to tighten or widen appropriately so you can stay connected to your opponent, and move to attack when the time is right.

MMA and submission grappling are going through a period of major technical innovation. Athletes are more fluidly blending wrestling into submissions to become dangerous from everywhere, and this weekend we have an opportunity to watch an MMA fighter that regularly uses rides and lower mounts to exhaust his opponents before submitting them.

Jailton Almeida Is A Modern Grappler

Jailton Almeida is headlining this weekend’s UFC card. His skillset is incredibly lopsided but his grappling is awesome.

In MMA we often see grapplers forget what sport they’re in. Instead of using striking to work towards better positions and submissions, they’re content to pass and pin. Almeida, on the other hand, uses striking and positional control to drown opponents until they give him submissions.

Almeida regularly combines lower mounts with leg and wrist rides to advance up his opponent’s body towards the submission. Often times Almeida ends up looking more like a freestyle wrestler than a Brazilian jiu-jitsu player. Recently Almeida has violently combined these techniques to overwhelm opposition. Below is a perfect example of points of control that Almeida often looks for.

Eventually Almeida’s opponent above, Anton Turkalj, got back to his feet. Unfortunately for him Almeida was able to immediately ground him again in an arguably worse position.

While Almeida is passing he does an excellent job of putting his weight low on his opponent’s legs to prevent them from bridging and easily standing-up. Against Turkalj, he used his own leg and hip positioning to keep Turkalj’s legs occupied and stuck underneath him. In Almeida’s next fight against Shamil Abdurakhimov he showed additional subtle craft.

In Almeida’s next fight with Jairzinho Rozenstruik he showed additional urgency to get an even faster submission win.

Riding And Sitting Heavy vs Just Standing Up

This weekend Jailton Almeida takes on UFC knockout king Derrick Lewis. I’m not interested in the fight to see if Lewis can knock Almeida out. I’m interested in how their specific grappling styles work against one another.

Lewis is not known as a grappler, and he shouldn’t be. If anything Lewis is an extreme example of anti-grappler. When Lewis is on the floor he does whatever he can to just stand up and keep striking.

Almeida’s grappling style is built to counteract just this. Everything he does on top does two things:

1. Disrupts your base so you can’t get up

2. Threatens damage so you overreact and give up a worse position

Lewis is a giant, explosive, tricky fighter; can he use that to get up off the bottom against Almeida? Probably, maybe, but can he do that more than a few times? That I’m not necessarily so confident about.

There are a lot of interesting grapplers in MMA right now, and they’re not simply wrestlers or Brazilian jiu-jitsu players like they used to be. The high level grapplers in MMA are blending grappling styles to threaten and control their opponent everywhere the fight goes on the floor. They’re using Brazilian jiu-jitsu to threaten submissions and sweeps so they can get up, and then using more traditional wrestling attacks to keep their opponent down and exhaust them. We’re seeing this trend in no gi jiu-jitsu competitions as well. This is probably most obvious in Alexander Volkanovski’s recent wins, and his grappling coach, Craig Jones’s, cash cow instructionals.

Almeida’s style and success should be a reminder that viewing grappling as only a means to an end is a mistake. Being underneath an effective grappler can literally squish the life out of you. Not only are you not scoring, but you’re likely expending more energy as they drop their weight on you and throw you around. This only gets more tiring in MMA when your opponent can throw punches.

I’m excited to see how this dynamic plays out this Saturday. Can Almeida out grapple Lewis, or will The Black Beast can just stand up?