Escape from Mount with arms pinned

G'day all,

Heres a question for the grapplers but please if you have a solution jump in.

I'm looking for some suggestions for escaping the mount when they have your arms pinned to the ground.

basically the position is a standard mount with his legs hooked in under mine, he has hold of your arms one the forearms near to the elbow pinning them to the floor with his weight.

now from this position the only harm he can do is to head butt, which you can counter to a degree bu tucking the chin and receiving i on the think part of your forehead and you can buck to help him miss. Other then that he pretty well has to disengage to punch or apply another tactic which will allow you a free arm to defend/attack with. As far as being in a dangerous position it isn't "too" bad, obviously being mounted is not a good position in general. this kind of restraint doesn't pose too much danger to the guy underneath as the offence is limited or engaged in pinning you done.

this is fine in the ring, but in a self defence situation if someone has you in this position they are doing it for a reason, they are either holding you down until their mates arrive to kick field goals or worst they are holding you down so their mate/s can perform some other criminal act, possibly against a weaker person. (eg preventing you from stopping a r***).

so what can the person do.

P.S. Buck and role did not work in this case, no matter how high I through my hips, the hooks he had in enabled him to simply ride the buck and his hands on the forarms provide surprisingly stable posts. I was able to eventually escape by somehow releasing one of my arms, I don't know exactly what I did, but I used a lot of my strength to do it, strength which most of my students wouldn't have.

Lateral movement of my arms didn't help much either as the range of motion of my arms didn't translate to a large change in the positioning of his arms, it took a lot of strength to get his posts into any position that was even vaguely unstable. I found I had to try to try to get my arms above my head with my elbows close together to narrow his posts and reduce their base, but this took a lot of effort and even when I did this he seemed to be quite stable, from here I was able to grap one of his wrist with my other hand which gave me some control but still could get the buck and roll to take effect .
I've been able to use explosive lateral movement quite effectively when the mounted guy pinned the wrist, but it all seemed to change when the pin was applied to the forearms/elbow area, the lateral movement just didn't seem to produce enough change in base to to effect his stability as it would with the wrist. ( which makes sense seeing as you can move you wrist further and thus disrupt his posts to a greater degree.

anyway I think that pretty well covers my initial thoughts. I'm pretty confident with my ground work but it is one of my weaker areas, a trained grappler should be able to own me relatively easily.( if we stick to grappling rules :P )

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

First, let me say that I wouldn't really call myself a grappler yet, because I'm still pretty new to it all myself. With that being said....

This is a strange position to be in. I imagine first off that this guy must have some pretty large hands if he is able to pin you at the elbow so well.

What caught my eye was this:



(When I say all this, I'm making the assumption that you can't bend you're arms AT ALL in order to break him down and turn him:)

The thing to keep in mind here is that it's not really his arms that are pinning you, but it's his legs, in that that is where all his power is coming from. By allowing your legs to remain hooked like this, you are making it impossible to escape. So the first thing to do is to get his legs unhooked from yours. In order for his legs to remain hooked like that, I would guess that your own legs are pretty much staying static. In order to unhook your legs from his, you'll have to bridge your hips, create some space and unhook them. The thing to keep in mind is that you're not bucking up to throw him off, because, unless you're way stronger that kind of thing just isn't going to fly--ever. You're bridging in order to create space for the legs to get out of his hooks.

In this situation, he doesn't really have a submission on you yet, and, more importantly, the way he is pinning might mean that his weight is already leaning forward, possibly making it easier to bridge him not directly up, but up and a little forward--either way, by creating space for your legs with your hips, you should be able to unhook your legs. Continue to work the hips, and you should be able to slide your arms a few inches to get to the point where you can bend them: from there go to your basic mount escapes.

Here Roy Harris demonstrates a 'foot drag' mount escape, which might be good for this situation (once the legs are free), because it relies little on the arms:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F77YgmAoo0

Of course all this advice is meant for a friendly grappling situation, and something that can be trained alive. If something like this happened on the street, while bridging my hips I would also bite the fleshy part of his hand, between the thumb and forefinger (seeing as how it is so close), and also try to tear a chunk of that out. Even if it didn't work, it would distract him while I was working the legs and getting out the position.

--Chris