Perfect Your Body Lock Squeeze With Benson Henderson

The body lock is one of the most dominant positions in all of combat sports. This position minimizes the options that your opponent has at their disposal and maximizes yours. You are basically in complete control of your opponent and they have to work really hard to gain any ground that they can. This will tire them out on top of the squeeze that you should be applying to them, which should be crushing the air out of their lungs. 

Maybe you don’t know how to properly squeeze when you have the body lock. This is bad because not only are you not getting the most out of this position, it also means that your body lock is easier to escape from. This means there is a higher chance of your opponent escaping and having all that hard work you put into getting the body lock mean nothing. 

In this video Benson Henderson goes over a few details that can go a long way in improving your body lock clinch. Benson Henderson is one of the top MMA lightweight fighters in the world, being a former UFC champion and WEC champion and is currently competing in Bellator. Despite being mainly known for his impressive striking, Benson definitely has a strong grappling game with a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and experience in submission wrestling. 

Benson goes over small details in this video that can be the difference between maintaining a strong body lock and your opponent easily breaking out of the position. Benson points out that you shouldn’t be satisfied with just getting a hold of your opponent and pulling your hands towards yourself. You need to make sure that you aren't flaring your elbows, which happens when people focus solely on bringing their hands towards themselves. 

You need to try to pinch your elbows together downwards and pull them towards you to maximize your squeeze potential. This works for both the front body lock where you and your opponent’s chests are touching, as well as for the back body lock where your chest is touching your opponent’s back. 

Doing this makes it so that your elbows and forearms are next to or even behind  your torso,while still touching it when you are applying a squeeze on your opponent. Your arms should be in a similar position to somebody doing a row with a neutral grip on some weights. 

Remember that you want to keep everything tight when maintaining a body lock. This way you can crush the air out of your opponent and maintain a level of control to do whatever you want to them. 

With a solid body lock on your opponent you can throw, sweep, takedown and even strike, with very little chance of being countered. Benson even shows some options that you have in terms of takedowns off of a solid back body lock in the video. 

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