1. First--info on this month's RAW which is chockfull of Top Saddle/Mounted & Cross-Body Submission chains. See the next block for details.
2. This week's article is a short musing on why we see so few Top Wrist-Locks any more (and what we can do about that.)
3. In this week's Video Clip, Coach Brad Butchka helps me demo one variation of the Lateral Drop (tons of variations of these on RAW 136.)
4. 138 RAWs and counting. Makes it tough to know where to start or plunge in, right? We've just added a RAW Matrix section to the site that separates the RAW material into categories so you can better locate what tickles your combat fancy. You'll find the material broken into 5 categories for easy browsing. You can have a look at the RAW Matrix here: http://extremeselfprotection.com/index.php/raw-matrix
5. We've added another two-fer seminar to the schedule. We'll be playing with Coach Miller's Crew August 22nd and then running in the Spartan Super the next day. If you want in on this madness see our Places to Go, People to See section in today's newsletter.
6. This month's special allows you to utilize that new RAW Matrix and pick any 5 volumes of the RAW Series for only $100 even S & H included (and yep, that includes international orders as well). See the April special Block for details.

   
    

And last, but not least, check out the ESP RAW Subscription service info to your left. You can save yourself some money on this volume of RAW ($5.50 to be exact) and pick up 3 more volumes of RAW absolutely free.

 The Top Wrist-Lock (TWL) or its BJJ variant the Americana are a staple of beginner and intermediate grappling instruction and thusly a large part of the attempted submissions you see by grapplers within this skill-range. But, we seldom see the TWL as a finisher in high-level competition (I can count on the fingers of one hand the TWLs that have finished in the UFC over the last 3-5 years).

With that said, have we over-valued this submission or is something else at play?

Perhaps a little of both.

I suspect that the TWL/Americana is one of the first submissions taught because it is a relatively low-tech sub with few set-up hiccups in a cooperating partner.

This sub is almost exclusively taught from the Top Saddle or Mounted position as the cross-body variant calls for a little too much chasing to be practical. But this top saddle/mounted set-up may be the root of why it practically disappears at the upper level.

The top saddle TWL relies on a straight ahead set-up/attack that calls for 2-on-1 engagement--meaning the standard TWL attack requires the offensive player to commit 2-hands to the attacked limb. This 2-to-1 attack also fosters a bit of top-heaviness in positioning, meaning that to wrestle the attacked arm into position there is typically a bit of weight commitment towards the attacked corner which can lead to over-rotation assisting the bottom player's escape, or at the very least the defender gets to use this "hips lite" position to burst the arm out of jeopardy.

My guess is that there is nothing wrong with the submission itself, it's the commonly used set-up that leads to the lost opportunities and eventual abandonment. It is for these very set-up problems that we have adapted a cross-over set-up almost exclusively (as we detail on RAW 138) that allows for only 1-on-1 engagement, full hips-thru, and full spurs in the top saddle position.

This cross-over set up also opens up a practical/pragmatic way to hit the TWL even from the cross-body.

I bring all of this up, simply because I hate to see a good sub used so little, even if I completely agree with why it faded away. They key is, more often than not, re-engineering our set-ups than scrapping perfectly good weapons.