Technique Appreciation Station - Guillotine choke

Welcome to Leg Kick TKO, a MMA blog that's been learning takedown defense from a Weeble.

This time on Technique Appreciation Station, a fairly standard choke with a couple of interesting variations, the guillotine choke.

Protect Ya Neck!

Before we can fully explore the wonders of the guillotine, we must first learn how to apply a simple, basic guillotine choke. Pretty straight forward, just grab a neck and do a squeeze thing and bing, bang, boom, guillotine.

Standard, in-guard guillotines are all well and good, but there are enough variants to keep things interesting:

There's the arm-in guillotine, or what I sometimes call the "whoopsie d'arce-aconda".

Also fun is the standing guillotine.

Wonderful, terrible things

 Especially if you are like Dan Miller or Scott Jorgensen and can do terrible things to your opponent.

If you combine the arm-in and the standing, you get the B-League Special, and it's always fun watching Bellator prelims, trying to guess which fights will end with a standing arm-in guillotine.

A slight modification to the standing guillotine is the power guillotine, done with a grip similar to a rear naked choke, and made famous by Team Alpha Male, which is why I call it the Brollotine.

Similar to the Brollotine is Tim Kennedy's Oswald, which I've only seen once, but it was horrifying and cool at the same time.

Some weird people in England have really goofed up the entire concept of the guillotine and "invented" something they call the "Grobbit". Do not ever attempt the "Grobbit", it is dumb and so are those weird Britishers.

The ultimate in guillotine variations, though, is the devastating McKenzietine. Perfected by Cody McKenzie he utilized to hilarious effect on The Ultimate Fighter.

Fear not, friends! Should you ever find yourself ensnared in a guillotine, you do have one avenue for salvation: the Von Flue shoulder choke. It's not going to work all the time, and I believe it is pretty much useless against the McKenzietine, but it's not bad if there's nothing else. Plus, it's a weird, wonky, rarely used submission, and I'm all about those.

What Did We Learn?

• Gurgle
• Blurble
• Bleargh
• *unconscious*

Technique Appreciation Station - Chin-in-eye submission

Welcome to Leg Kick TKO, a MMA blog that doesn't actually talk about leg kick TKOs (Whoops!).

This time on TAS we look back to the ye olden timey days of mixed martial arts where rules were scarce. In the early days of MMA (And also Vale Tudo), wrestlers basicaly had three paths to victory:

1. Headbutts - get atop a man and smash his face into a jelly with your own noggin
2. Knees to the head - get atop a man, move to north/south position, and smash his brain to paste with knees
3. Chin in eye submission - get atop a man and jam your jawbone into his eyesocket until the dude gives the hell up

Before people wised up and outlawed this crazy-ass 'technique', there were a few notable instances of its effectiveness.

"The Smashing Machine" Mark Kerr submitted Dan Bobish to win the finals of the UFC 14 Heavyweight tournament.

Chin in eye wizard Chirs Haseman has two victories by that 'hold', one of which is over "The King of Rock and Rumble" Elvis Sinosic.

I fully appreciate the effectiveness of the submission, but something that directly targets the eyes is a little too much in my book. I'm glad it's illegal, and now there is nothing in all of MMA that can threaten a fighter's vision (Except everything else, like getting punched in the eye, or glove seams cutting the eyelids, or "accidental" eye pokes, or, if you're Mike Winklejohn, one of your students cutting your eyeball with his toenail)

Technique Appreciation Station - German suplex

Welcome to Leg Kick TKO, a MMA blog that's never met an opponent it didn't try to duck.

Well lookie here, a new article category that I'm sure will be used once or twice and then forgotten or ignored! This time, instead of talking about dudes what do cool moves, I'm just going to focus on cool moves done by a bunch of different guys, because screw analysis, let's just look at GIFs!

There are a lot of different grappling arts at play in mixed martial arts, and since every fight starts standing (Wheelchair karate bouts notwithstanding), they all include various methods of getting an opponent to the ground. The cooler arts include throws, because the ancient masters knew that hucking some dorkus through the air and onto his face looked pretty sweet. Wrestling has some exceptional throws, which makes sense since it was devloped initially by thick-necked farmhands as a means of transporting livestock. The raddest of all wrestling throws is the suplex, and at the top of the suplex list is the German variant (Or belly to back if you want to be a lame pedant about things)

Soup-Flex, You Say? Do Go On!

First of all, this ain't no portmanteau, it's a dang suplex, so get it right, or pay the price. Second of all, fake dumb reader I constantly berate, I think we should watch a brief tutorial on how to properly suplex some jamoke out his (Or her!) shoes.

Now that proper suplexery has been explained to us, it's time to see the German in action for real. Check out a plethora of GIFs and videos after the jump because I don't want to explode anyone's browsers or however that works.