Learning to escape mount against significantly bigger opponents is always going to be tough, but Emily Kwok has something up her sleeve that will help fix that problem. The majority of new grapplers will probably learn the traditional trap-and-roll escape from mount when they first start, but the fact is that a smaller competitor is going to have a lot of difficulty rolling a larger one. This difficulty becomes even more pronounced when the smaller grappler is a woman and the larger grappler as a man, because those physical differences become even greater.
This is something that can often lead to frustration from smaller men and women who start BJJ, particularly when sparring with other newer grapplers as well. Higher belts will generally find it much easier to control something and their positioning will be far better, so they’ll have to use significantly less weight when controlling someone newer. Not just that, but they’re also far more likely to let a new person work and go with their transitions in order to allow them to get more valuable practice time in. That all goes out the window when the other person is also new, because they’re going to be eager to ‘win’ the roll and they won’t know how to control their weight anywhere near as well.
Emily Kwok is one of the best grapplers to take advice from when trying to escape from underneath bigger opponents in mount too, as she’s a fantastic coach. Not only that, but Kwok was a competitor who rose to the top of the sport and won an IBJJF World Championship back in 2007. This was a time when so few women were actually training in the sport that anyone looking to compete at the highest level had to train with bigger partners on a daily basis.
The footage of Emily Kwok explaining how to escape mount when going against bigger opponents was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Stephan Kesting:
