The very first black belt I trained under was Rodrigo Vaghi. When I was a white belt Rodrigo was at the gym before a seminar. He was watching me roll with another white belt. After the round was over Rodrigo took me aside and said "When you are rolling, if the guy opens your legs, you are getting passed. But, if YOU open your legs, you are playing open guard. Do you understand?" I said yes. I understood the words that he said. What I didn't understand was the MEANING of the words that he said.
I said I understood, because, if you take the words at pure face value, the meaning is obvious. To the uninitiated, someone telling you that is kind of a "duh!" moment. To the uninitiated, they may even think that if their legs are opened they are playing open guard.
What he was telling me, however, had nothing to do with how to enter in to open guard. What he was trying to tell me about was the Initiative. When rolling, the person who is enacting their plan and working their game is the one in control. Thus, if you are training correctly, you should bet thinking a step or two a head of your current movement. In this case, opening your legs to start open guard. Therefore, your opponent has to react to your movement, and is therefore a step behind. In this case, YOU have the initiative.
Conversely, if you have your legs opened, your opponent has the initiative, and is working towards the pass. YOU are reacting to him by moving in to open guard, and therefore are a step behind him.
The initiative changes back and forth in a good roll. As you become more and more experienced, you learn ways of countering movements, and regaining the initiative, and you learn and experience typical ways to defend or counter movements and you are then ready to defend against these movements and maintain the initiative.
This is a difficult concept to grasp. I don't normally tell white belts about it. They just don't have the experience to get what I am talking about. The talk of the initiative, goes right above their heads. I normally introduce this to my purple belts. They typically have enough experience to start to grasp what I am talking about. It is at that belt, normally, that they begin to understand drilling just isn't something you do in between the warm up and rolling. Drilling is that vital time where you learn the basics of a movement and how to execute it in a situation. The more you drill, the more automatic your movements become. The more automatic your movements become, the less you have to think about them, and can, therefore think more steps ahead, and therefore, maintain the initiative.
Let's take a simple movement, and start on the ground. My movements in a scissor sweep begins by off balancing my opponent, opening my guard and putting my legs in to the correct position, while controlling the outside arm. I then move my opponent's center of gravity up on to my leg, and sweep with the outside leg. As my opponent falls, I move forward strongly in to mount, still controlling the outside arm. As I complete the mount movement, moving my knees as high as I can in to my opponent's arm pits, I push what was the outside arm across my opponent's body and move into an "S" mount. Finally, I finish by swinging my outside leg around my opponent's head and finish with the armbar.
Easy enough? Now I drill that over and over and over and over again. Until I don't need to think about the movements. When I hit this series in rolling, I don't need to think about anything, it just happens. My opponent goes from being in the top position to defending an armbar before he knows what happened. This is the initiative.
If the initiative changes, the situation changes completely. A common mistake for lower belts to make is once their guard is broken open, they move their legs in to a scissor sweep position. Then they wonder why their scissor sweeps never work. They have lost the initiative, and are several steps behind. They are fooling themselves in to thinking they are playing open guard, when they are, in fact, being passed.
I think a lot about who has the initiative after rolls. I try to go over in my head where I gained and lost the initiative during the roll. It helps to figure out where I need to work and how my game needs to adjust to different body types and styles.
