These are elevation guards. In butterfly you sit up with your insteps hooked behind their knees, chest close, and one arm inside or over their back; the sweep happens when you fall to one side and lift with the opposite hook. X-guard takes the same idea further by wrapping one of their legs with both of yours and separating it from the floor entirely, leaving them balancing on a single post that you control. Both positions collapse if you lie flat, because the hooks only elevate when your torso is upright enough to carry the load.
Key points
- Sit up on one hip in butterfly rather than resting on your tailbone, which kills every angle you need.
- Hook with the instep behind the knee, not the toes on the thigh, so the lift has a shelf.
- Take an underhook or a same-side sleeve and collar pair before attempting any elevation from butterfly.
- Enter X-guard by threading underneath a stepped-up leg, then close your ankles and extend to break their base.
- Shift their weight over the leg you are not attacking, so the leg you lift carries nothing.
Common mistakes
- Trying to elevate a heavy opponent while sitting flat with your back on the mat and no grips.
- Lifting with the hook alone instead of falling to the side and using your whole body as a lever.
- Leaving your outside knee low in X-guard, which lets them step over and settle straight into a pass.
Put it into practice
Elevation ladder
- Sit in butterfly against a kneeling partner and take twenty seconds to establish a grip and an angle.
- Perform ten butterfly sweeps to each side, exaggerating the fall onto your shoulder before the hook lifts.
- From a single-leg X entry, extend your legs ten times and hold their base broken for two seconds.
- Chain butterfly into X-guard five times, switching only at the moment your partner posts a leg wide.
butterfly guardx-guardhookssweeps