Gui Mendes: Lapel Tricks for De La Riva & X-Guard in BJJ
Back in November 2016, we put up a short Gui Mendes clip on a BJJ detail that's easy to miss: once you're set in De La Riva or X-guard, your own lapel is a free grip nobody is accounting for. Most…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
Back in November 2016, we put up a short Gui Mendes clip on a BJJ detail that's easy to miss: once you're set in De La Riva or X-guard, your own lapel is a free grip nobody is accounting for. Most Jiu Jitsu players at the time were still thinking of De La Riva and X-guard as a hands-and-hooks problem, sleeve here, collar there, foot on the hip. Gui's variation added a third channel. He'd pull his own lapel across, feed it around the trapped leg, and use it to lock the connection down without spending a hand on it. That freed grip is what let him attack sweeps and back takes that a purely hand-fought De La Riva couldn't reach. It looked like a small detail in 2016. It's one of the load-bearing ideas in modern open-guard Jiu Jitsu now.
Watch it: Gui Mendes' De La Riva & X-guard lapel variations.
Why the lapel changes the De La Riva & X-guard equation
The problem with De La Riva and X-guard has always been the same one: they're grip-hungry positions, and a good passer knows exactly which grip to strip to collapse the whole structure. Gui's answer was to stop treating the gi as passive fabric and start treating it as a spare limb. Wrap the lapel around the far leg from De La Riva and the position holds itself, the passer can't just peel a hand off, because there's no hand there to peel. What's freed up is a hand that used to be busy holding the leg in place, and Gui used it for exactly what you'd expect: reaching for the far pant cuff to load a sweep, or clearing space to spin under into a back take when the passer over-committed to the stack. The lapel wasn't decoration. It was doing the job a hand used to do, for free, so the hand could go do something else.
That single swap, gi doing the holding, hands doing the attacking, is the same logic behind almost every major lapel innovation that followed. It's the DNA of the worm guard, the squid, the reverse De La Riva lapel wraps that fill BJJ Fanatics catalogues today. Gui and the Mendes brothers weren't the only ones pulling on this thread in the mid-2010s, but the De La Riva/X-guard version in this clip was an early, clean statement of the idea: your gi is not just something an opponent grips. It's something you grip back with.
What the lapel-DLR family looks like in 2026
Ten years on, that idea is everywhere in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Mikey Musumeci runs lapel control through his De La Riva and reverse De La Riva entries as a matter of course, freeing both hands to fight for the finishing grip on a leg entanglement or a back take. Tainan Dalpra and the current Art of Jiu Jitsu roster, the academy Gui and Rafa built, still teach this exact family as a foundation position, not a trick move. Ffion Davies has shown flashes of the same lapel-tether logic in her open guard at ADCC and world level, using the gi to hold a leg in place while both hands work the upper body. None of it reads as a gimmick anymore. It's just how a serious gi guard player uses the extra four feet of fabric hanging off their own hips.
The lesson underneath the technique has aged even better than the grip itself. Gui was showing, in miniature, that a position isn't finished once the frame is in, it's finished once you've worked out which parts of that frame can hold themselves, so your hands are free for the next problem. That's the difference between a guard player who's collecting positions and one who's actually solving the puzzle in front of them.
Drilling the lapel-DLR / X-guard connection
The instructional infrastructure to actually learn this properly barely existed in 2016. It's everywhere now. Rafa and Gui's own material lives on the AOJ platform, BJJ Fanatics has multiple De La Riva and lapel-guard sets from multiple black belts, and free breakdowns of the lapel-lock mechanic are a YouTube search away. What still has to happen on the mat is the unglamorous part: get into De La Riva, feed your own lapel around the trapped leg with a cooperative partner, and feel what actually locks and what just looks locked. Then ask what your now-free hand should be doing, pant cuff, far collar, or already reaching for the back. That's the actual skill Gui was pointing at in this clip, and it's still worth the mat time in 2026.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 8 November 2016. Refreshed for 2026.