Face the opponent's hips at all times — square your hips to theirs and keep your feet and knees between you and them.
Use frames on the hips and shoulders to create distance the moment they try to pass or pressure in.
Recompose by inverting, shrimping, or re-pummeling the legs to re-establish an open or closed guard.
John Danaher took the most-lost exchange in jiu-jitsu — the guard being passed — and rebuilt it as a solvable problem with a fixed order of operations. His Go Further Faster guard-retention system reframes the legs as a first line of defense and insists retention is cheaper than recovery, a framing that reshaped how the sport teaches defense from the bottom.
The sport's most feared guard passer also built a system for not being passed. Codified in his no-gi instructional They Shall Not Pass, Gordon Ryan's retention game is organized around his own loose-versus-tight passing taxonomy and taught through live gym footage — the defensive mirror image of the passing game that made his name.