Ben Askren: Askren Brothers Hand Fighting
Hand fighting is one of those areas that gets talked about a lot in wrestling and grappling circles but rarely receives the dedicated, structured treatment it deserves. Most instructionals touch on it as a preamble to something else. Ben Askren's hand fighting instructional, which you can get via this link, actually makes it the main event. After going through it, I have a much clearer picture of why so many matches are won or lost before a single takedown attempt is ever made.
The central idea running through everything Askren teaches is control through connection. Your elbows stay in to your ribs at all times. That's not a suggestion, it's the structural rule the whole system runs on. When your elbows flare out, you become vulnerable. When they stay in, you're compact and hard to move.
From there, a lot of what he covers is about managing ties and grips. When you lock up, you pull their elbow in hard and simultaneously push your head into their shoulder and neck. That combination creates pressure that disrupts their base and limits what they can do. The push and pull dynamic matters too. When working a two on one, you keep your thumb in front so you can both pull and push depending on what's needed. He uses a simple cue: you should be able to look at your thumb. If you can't, your positioning is off.
The goal in any tie up is to cut your opponent off and get them moving either into you or away from you. Passive gripping gets you nowhere. You're always looking to dictate direction.
Defending ties is where I found the most immediately useful material. Askren breaks down several options for getting out of a neck tie, and they're not presented as a rigid hierarchy, any of them can work depending on the situation. You can use your shoulder and neck to pressure into them, push their hands off, snap their grip at the wrist, punch their underhook, use your head and swim in, or clamp with a gable grip and drag them straight down to their elbows. Having multiple answers to the same problem is the point. You read what's available and take it.
When rolling under a neck tie, he draws a comparison to a boxer slipping a punch. The mechanics are similar but the detail that makes it work in wrestling is keeping your ear connected to your shoulder as you roll through, then whipping their arm to the side. Without that ear to shoulder connection, you leave yourself exposed coming out the other side.
He also mentions the European sprawl as an option worth developing. The underlying principle, keeping your elbows in and your structure tight, carries over into everything else he shows.
The last thing that stood out was the emphasis on stripping grips constantly. Don't let your opponent establish a hold on you. Pull their fingers off. The moment you tolerate a grip is the moment they start setting something up. In hand fighting, the person who controls the grips controls the pace, and controlling the pace is most of the game.