Stay in your stance with your lead leg slightly forward, bent over at the hips, with your head up. Take a penetration step with your lead foot and place your knee in between their legs. As you do this, lower your level to make your center of gravity lower which gives you more balance and makes the shot much more difficult to block. Bring your trail leg up while your front knee secures your position on the mat, keeping your hands in a defensive position. Bring your front leg back up and return to the staggered stance. Practice strings of these shoots regularly to get into good wrestling shape.
Some wrestlers can shoot from farther away, while some need to be closer to do it properly. Practice your doubles on sparring partners to learn how close you need to be to do it properly with your strength and speed.
While you are taking the penetration step, lower your level to give yourself more balance and make the shot harder to counter. You should end up with your knee between their legs.
Trying to wrap up too high on the legs might seem like a better way of controlling your opponent, but most wrestlers’ thighs will be much too strong to control with your upper body. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to overpower the other wrestler’s center of gravity. Putting your ear to the side of their hip make everything tighter. Plus, not doing it leaves your head in in either of two different places: Either in the middle, which isn’t good; or way off to the side, which is awkward and can make your throw less powerful.
Your step to get up to your foot should be almost like another shoot, or a hop, powering through your opponent’s body and throwing them off their gravity. You’ve stolen that gravity by wrapping it up, now take them down. Keep your shoulder in tight, your arms snaked around your opponents lower legs, and driving forward and your opponent should be on the mat in no time. Keep moving forward
Good wrestlers will flop over onto their belly when you execute a double-leg take down. If so, this is still points for you, so take advantage of it by staying behind in a dominant position.
If you shoot in from too far away and drop to your knee with your head in your opponent’s armpit, you might as well wear a sign that says, “Hey, guillotine-choke me!” You’ve got to use this move in tandem with set-ups to get your opponents arms out of the way and get them to the ground before a strike is possible.
Alternatively, faking a double-leg is sometimes a good way of dropping your opponent’s arms to open up for strike attacks.
Practice half-shoots, in which you fake a shoot from far away, keeping your eye on your opponent’s knee the whole time, to make sure you come up short when it’s thrown. As soon as you see it up in the air, shoot back in to finish off the job. Your opponent will already be off-balance with one leg in the air.
When your opponent reaches in to grab the back of your head with one hand, grasp the forearm with a baseball-style grip, hugging it close into your body in a Russian arm bar. Your opponent’s natural instinct will be to push away from you with the other hand, at which point you can duck down, shoot the barred arm up into the other arm, tangling them and getting them out of the way. Drop into your shoot for the double-leg takedown.
