For the past several years, the loop choke has become one of the strongest attacks in my arsenal.

It wasn’t always that way though. In fact, before I became a black belt, the loop choke was in my list of abandoned techniques. I just never had any success with finishing it, and I shifted my focus elsewhere for many years.

One day, though, I realized that there were some commonalities in many different setups and executions.

 Then I applied those principles to the half guard, which I’ve used extensively, and bam, I struck gold. Almost over night, I started catching people with it left and right, and I haven’t looked back once.

I want you to have the same experience, so in this post, we will explore those three principles, starting with…

Set the Grip Right

How you set the grip for the loop choke is the first, and perhaps most important determinant of how effective the choke will be. If set wrong, you will struggle to finish the choke, and even if you succeed, it will require significant amounts of force.

It’s also the first area you should focus on when troubleshooting the finish.

Sometimes the fix can be a simple as just loosening up on a grip a little and letting it slide down the collar just a wee bit. That’s often enough to make a choke exquisitely clean, and the most common issue is that people set their grip too deep in the collar.

 If you set it right though, the next step is to make sure that…

Your Head is Higher Than Your Opponent’s

Once the grip is set, by hook or by crook, you have to get your head higher than your opponent’s.

That is just as important as setting the grip right, and I would even say that it is one of the main reasons I struggled with the choke for so long. Going for it from below makes it effortless for opponents to avoid the entrapment.

And in my case, I gave up on it after people kept slipping out with ease, until I realized how important relative head position is.

It was a game changer.

The last piece, though, was… 

Starting to Think about the Choke as a Guillotine

 There is more than one way to finish the choke once you set the grip and establish a higher head position, but the philosophy that has worked best for me is to think about the attack as a guillotine, even though there are some differences in the mechanics.

Why?

It’s because if you drive your opponent’s head towards the armpit of your first grip, it creates a stronger entrapment that will give you more time to adjust your application of the forces applied and maximize the effectiveness of the choke.

But the ideal finish position differs from a guillotine.

Instead, you want to put their head on your hip, but the arm of the first grip must still loop around the head.

That might be hard to imagine, so watch this video where I break it all down: