The chaos of a life or death struggle, especially at hand-to-hand combat range, can be mentally overwhelming. In a grappling encounter , this chaos level goes up exponentially. The better the skill set, the less this occurs, but what about for that person who is still learning to fight under in-extremis duress? 

Keep this checklist in mind, and follow it when you don’t know what the next step is. 

Breathe – this sounds like a “duh”, but under stress , most especially in grappling, this is about the first thing that falls apart. Either we stop breathing entirely, or we hyperventilate. Both ways mean we can get the right amount of oxygen into our body the needed way. Focus on forced exhalation. The following inhale tends to follow correctly after a good and powerful exhale. 

2) Move Your Hips – You May rightly ask “how”, and the answer is that it does not matter. Moving the core and the main driver of leverage (which are what the hips are) leads to some movement which makes correct movement easier are more likely. 

3) Underhook, underhook, underhook – The underhook is everything in grappling, whether standing, on the ground underneath an attacker, or on the ground on top of an attacker, the underhook takes care of so much. Get the underhook and keep the underhook, and a path to winning becomes visible regardless of position.