Technique Breakdown: Seated Ankle Pick

One Of My Favorite Picks!

One of my favorite takedowns is the Ankle Pick. I find that it has a low risk and high reward trade off. While there are things to be concerned about, the flying triangles for example. More often than not when I miss the ankle pick, I can either play guard or stand right back up.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

If you’re unfamiliar with the basic concepts of the technique, The Merge had an excellent breakdown. Mike Trasso is a former collegiate wrestler and current Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt out of New Jersey. An excellent source for takedowns for Jiu-Jitsu.

Traditional Ankle Pick:

I love doing a few version from the seated positions as soon as my opponent decides to either kneel or stand on front of me. The kneeling version comes in pretty handy and much like the standing version, you can hit it on either leg.

Seated Ankle Pick:

While this breakdown goes over the foundational aspects of my approach, something I’d add is that I will feint the ankle pick to keep my opponent off balance and busy. I’ll sometimes reach for it with no intention of committing and other times I’ll do like I did in the video, shifting their upper body to the side that I want to threaten later on.

Again, if I miss my opportunity, I haven’t lost anything. I just continue to play the seated game until I get what I want.

Hope you like the technique and get something out of this breakdown.

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