Side Triangle Escape
Side triangle escape — a triangle with the attacker on top and gravity on their side. Block the leg-over-shoulder entry, roll into them, frame the hip late.
Adapted from InGrappling, Side Triangle Escape. System Games did not invent this curriculum.
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The side triangle — yoko sankaku — is a triangle applied from beside you, with the attacker on top. For the attack, see Side Triangle. They are perpendicular rather than facing you or below you, their bodyweight is helping, and the leg wedge captures your head and your far arm — the one on the other side of your body, not the near one.
⚠ Its classic home is the turtle, where the legs do the job a chest connection does in a pin, and it also arrives as the rescue when a front triangle fails and the attacker ends up beside you instead of underneath. Both are worth knowing because they change when you expect it: this is not only something that happens after a guard exchange.
That inversion is the whole problem. Every triangle answer you have trained assumes you are the one on top — posture up, stack down, drive your weight through the lock. Here you are underneath a triangle rather than inside one, and the tools that make the standard escape work are the attacker’s tools now. Posture is not available; stacking is what is being done to you.
It comes from side control top, so the defender is a bottom player who was already defending a pin when the legs arrived. That sequence matters: the arm the triangle takes is usually a frame that was doing useful work a moment earlier.
Elevated RiskSide Triangle (Defence) is an elevated risk technique. A standard bilateral carotid compression, with one important difference in how quickly it arrives: the attacker is on top, so their bodyweight adds to the squeeze rather than the defender's weight resisting it. A triangle that would take real effort to finish from underneath finishes here with a settle. The defender also has fewer relief options — no posture to build, no stack to drive, and gravity working against every movement they might make. Serious injury can occur Seconds, and faster than the same lock applied from guard because the attacker's weight is part of the compression..
If you are new to this technique: read this section before anything else. Understanding the danger is part of understanding the technique.
The person applying the technique is responsible for releasing immediately.