6 Most Essential Skills Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD Review [2025]

Key Takeaways

• A No-Gi BJJ instructional offering detailed instructions into mastering the concept of a super-stable base for grappling. 
• Features structural details, goals, overall game planning and key issues you’ll encounter. 
• Contains passing examples against different guards along with ways to practice the material by yourself. 
• BJJ World Expert Rating: 9 out of 10. 

ESSENTIAL SKILS BASE TOP DIMA MUROVANNI DVD GET HERE:

How good are you at not getting swept when you’re the one trying to deal with a bottom player’s guard? Be honest with yourself, and you’ll quickly realize that you have been ignoring a huge aspect of BJJ for as long as you’ve been training.

Luckily, the Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD offers a quick way to fix this, although it won’t happen without effort. There is lots of material in it covering how to develop a base that keeps you on top and allows you to control and improve your position. If you’re wondering what exactly it is, check out this detailed review.

Stay on Top! 

My worst nightmare as a coach is when I see people give up top positions in the heat of battle on the mats. I don’t care if it is IBJJF rules or a bar brawl, you don’t give up top position once you achieve it!

Think about it: the only thing that you can do from the bottom that ends up rewarding you points is get on top! So why would you want to go back to a position that puts you further from a dominating win?

The Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD tackles this subject from a conceptual angle, providing you with plenty of information, not just on why you need to stay on top but also on how. Dima calls it one of the 6 essential skills, but I’d say that along with getting a hold of someone it is the absolute crucial skill that makes grappling possible in the first place!

Modern BJJ with Dima Murovanni

One of the people making Jiu-Jitsu really fun is definitely Dima Murovanni. The black belt emerged as a hidden jewel from one of the top gyms in Berlin and ended up heading the B-team’s competitive training sessions. Very impressive, considering that he just received his black belt and built his reputation as a world-class coach as a brown belt.

Dima has that relentless stubbornness when it comes to making Jiu-Jitsu simple rather than complex, a skill that is becoming popular among many coaches who do not suffer from old-school Gracie-style coaching traumas. Murovani’s Jiu-Jitsu really is for everyone, as his outstanding students, such as Jozef Chen, can confirm.

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of Dima’s work hit the BJJ Fanatics shelves in the form of instructionals. All the subjects he covers are different from the usual positional studies we’re used to seeing. This latest one, likely serving as an introduction to an upcoming series, is the Dima Murovanni Base Top DVD, a resource I wish I had about 10 years ago.

Essential Skills Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD Review

The Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD is an instructional with four volumes, covering the subject of base for top players in BJJ. Dima delivers a very precise structure in the DVD, making it easy to follow his instructions over the two and half hours of material.

Part 1 – Structuring Top Base

Dima begins his journey into this instructional by covering his concepts of progressing through BJJ as fast as possible, which involves focusing all your attention on six distinct skills. The first of those is the main subject of the Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD.

Base top is the skill to remain the top person despite all efforts of the bottom player to break your balance in any way, shape or form. Murovanni talks about the basic structure that allows you to stand or half kneel against any guard player.

Key concepts such as your main goals from the position, managing intensity and even how to structure your training all feature in this opening volume. Hand fighting and a few direct examples involving Ashi/Single leg X-guard put things into perspective even further.

Part 2 – Attaching From Top

The one thing that is absolutely unavoidable for successful grappling is attaching yourself to the opponent. Howeve,r this is often easier said than done, both because of the resistance of the opponent and the tendency for people to completely ignore the importance of attachments

In part two of the Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD, you’ll understand how to change levels from the top whenever you need to increase your stability and how to use optimal gripping techniques, such as underhooks, collar ties and foot grips. A few passes appear at the tail end of this volume.

Part 3 – Weight Shifting 

Past the halfway point of the Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD, the base top game outline starts to appear. That allows Dima to move into more active work, with the third portion of the instructional covering how to counter sweeping threats in detail.

Murovanni once again uses the Ashi to present his point, beginning with the elusive concept of weight shifting and how very subtle moves can completely kill the bottom player’s offensive game.

Passing and pinning after the pass makes up for half the material in this volume, featuring a host of different options. I quite liked the Ethan Crelinsten pass, and the step out, but the X-Guard base top section is definitely also worth exploring.

Part 4 – Killing Open Guards

As we reach the final portion of the Dima Murovanni Essential Skills DVD even more guards get destroyed by Dima’s concepts. He renders the De la Riva guard and all its variations useless first, delivering not just his ideas but also ways to present them to others, which is exceptionally useful for coaches.

The K-Guard also gets some time in the spotlight as one of the most common guards these days. Pass-wise, the double under dominates in this final portion,  executed off the immovable base built in the previous three volumes.

Murovanni ends by explaining the pocket of exchanges he likes to stick to when fighting for base top. Once again, he delivers examples of how you can show it, along with giving you the Hail Mary option to pull out of any guard-pass exchange.

Developing Your Jiu-Jitsu Skills

I agree a hundred per cent with Murovanni that to excel in grappling fast, you need to focus on building skills rather than collecting positions and techniques. It is not just a faster but also a much better way to understand Jiu-Jitsu at its’ core, which is movement.

Where I disagree with Dima is on the number of skills you need. There are more than 6 if you really want to fine-tune your grappling skills. That said, one of them certainly is being able to remain on top and use the advantage to see off a match, whether by submission or via points.

The Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD is a good resource to push you into thinking about grappling in this manner of skill acquisition. Next time you roll, give it a try and see how good you are at staying on top when bottom players try to sweep, reverse or submit you.

DOWNLOAD HERE: BASE TOP DIMA MUROVANNI DVD

6 Most Essential Skills

I expect that Dima is going to go a lot deeper into the full set of six essential skills to help you learn BJJ fast. If the Essential Skills Base Top Dima Murovanni DVD, which I take is the first in the series, is anything to judge him on, we’re in for yet another Danaher-esque reshape of how we see Jiu-Jitsu and what matters when we roll.

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