Rafa Mendes' Collar and Sleeve Guard: A BJJ Study
Rafa Mendes was arguably the best featherweight in the sport's history, and the collar and sleeve guard he built is more relevant now than ever. He has long since retired from competition, but the…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
Rafa Mendes was arguably the best featherweight in the sport's history, and the collar and sleeve guard he built is more relevant now than ever. He has long since retired from competition, but the rest of Jiu Jitsu has spent the years since catching up to the guard he demonstrates in this study. Here's footage of the master at work, so go watch it.
Watch it: Rafa Mendes' collar and sleeve guard study.
Why collar and sleeve is the thinking player's open guard
The position itself is simple to describe and maddening to pass. One hand grips the collar, controlling posture. The other controls a sleeve, killing one of the passer's posts. The feet do the rest, on the hip, on the biceps, hooking behind the knee, turning the bottom player into a set of springs and levers the top player has to solve all at once. What made Rafa's version special was less about any single grip and more about how early he won the exchange. Watch any of his matches from that era and the collar and sleeve grips arrive almost before his opponent has finished standing up. He wasn't playing guard so much as installing a problem.
From there, everything connected. The collar and sleeve controls fed his De La Riva hook, the De La Riva fed the berimbolo, and the berimbolo fed the back take that finished so many of his world championship runs. That chain (grips first, entanglement second, the back last) is the skeleton of the modern lightweight gi game. You can trace a straight line from Rafa's collar and sleeve entries to the games that Mikey Musumeci, Diego "Pato" Oliveira and Mica Galvão have been running at the top of the sport, and to the polished guard work coming out of Art of Jiu Jitsu, the academy Rafa built with his brother Gui, where students like Tainan Dalpra and Cole Abate grew up on these exact positions.
What the study still teaches a 2026 Jiu Jitsu student
Strip away the highlight-reel finishes and the study rewards slow watching. Notice that the grips are never passive: the collar grip is always breaking posture or threatening a choke, the sleeve grip is always loading a sweep or clearing a post. Notice that his feet move as much as his hands, swapping between the hip, the biceps and the leg the instant the passer changes angle. And notice how rarely he ends up flat: the collar and sleeve guard is played on the side, hips light, always a quarter-turn away from an attack.
Rafa's own framing in the video is refreshingly blunt. If your collar and sleeve is better, he says, your guard is better, because those two grips are what let you control the distance between you and the passer. Get them right and everything downstream falls into place. He goes as far as to say that once you have a good collar and sleeve guard, every other guard you play starts to feel more natural, because you have already solved the hardest problem in guard work: managing space and posture at the same time.
There is one detail beginners almost always miss, and Rafa calls it out directly. When you are learning the position, simply holding the collar and the sleeve is fine. When you are actually fighting, it is not enough. In a live match you have to pull those grips hard, arms bent and loading rather than hanging straight, actively stretching your opponent out and keeping his posture broken. Passive grips are a drill. Loaded, pulling grips are the guard.
In 2016 you had to hunt down competition footage to study this. In 2026 the homework is easier than it has ever been: Rafa's full instructional material is on BJJ Fanatics, AOJ runs its own online platform, and every major match from his career is a YouTube search away, sitting in the same phone you scroll between rounds. Access is no longer the barrier. What's missing is the willingness to watch a world champion's guard the way he built it: one grip at a time.
So treat this the way the original post intended, just with 2026 tools. Pick one detail (the early collar grip, the live feet, the off-the-hip angle) and drill it into your open guard for a month. The berimbolo generation Rafa helped create isn't slowing down, and the collar and sleeve guard is still the cleanest doorway into it.
See you on the mats.
Originally published on Jiu Jitsu Style, 14 March 2016. Refreshed for 2026.