Back in my blue belt days, my training partners complained that I was doing “anti jiu-jitsu”. I was keeping myself safe the best way that I knew how, and that became a frustration for them, because I wasn’t “going for things”. Well, every time I would attempt to use a technique, it resulted in me losing my position and getting tapped. Every time. I was familiar with enough techniques by then to be able to drill them, and maybe even help out some new folks, but what I couldn’t do was use those techniques in a live scenario against anybody but the freshest white belts. My situation became increasingly frustrating for me, and while pinpointing the answer would take me another several years to be able to verbalize, the problem was that I didn’t know what jiu-jitsu actually was.
I went on a desperate hunt for answers by buying up all kinds of instructional videos and spending hours on YouTube. I did that for probably at least a year before I realized that I had been chasing the wrong rabbit.
Jiu-jitsu is not a list of techniques.
Not only is it not a list of techniques, but if you’re having problems, you won’t have very much success at all by looking to them for answers without understanding why you need to replace what you already know. (Sorry, content sales folk.) Once you have a basic foundation (more on that later), a different technique isn’t going to save you if you’re having problems getting caught in positions or submissions. You don’t need a different spider guard pass. Well, unless the one you know is not fundamentally sound.
I’m glad you asked.
Fundamentals are the rules and constants of, in our case, grappling that transcend all. If what you’re looking at changes based on environment, rules, weight classes, body type, athletic capabilities, or anything else along those lines – it’s not fundamentally sound. An example would be that standing on one leg when the force of another human is moving in your direction isn’t a good idea, no matter the context. So, having a base capable of dealing with that force is fundamental. Asking yourself “what about this situation might compromise my stability?” is getting on the path to ensuring that your technical repertoire is fundamentally sound. If that’s not something you’ve ever thought to take into consideration, you might start thinking you’re a “natural guard player” since bottom positions are where you tend to end up.
A common misconception is that Fundamentals and Basics are the same thing. Fundamentals are the inescapable rules that govern us, and Basics are the techniques that everybody should know and that list is usually dictated by specific rule sets or contexts, and can vary widely from school to school. A scissor sweep is a Basic. It’s been labeled as the best sweep in jiu-jitsu by multiple world champions and it works at every level of jiu-jitsu competition. However, if you find yourself trying to set up a scissor sweep in a wrestling match, you’ve probably already lost that match as a result of the rules of wrestling. Is it a Basic? In a jiu-jitsu context, yes. In a sport where the rules state that if your shoulders are on the floor, you lose, no.
Depth of conversation on that topic will have to be a separate post.
I like to use analogies when I’m explaining a potentially new concept, because 1) Relatable topics help us orient new ideas, and 2) I’m pretty good at them. Most of us reading this have tried to cook something at some point. (You should all know how to cook. It’s a life skill, and there’s no excuse for not being at least decent at it.) When you’re first learning how to cook, it’s pretty typical that finding a recipe is your first step. Let’s use cookies. If you knew zero about cookies, you can find everything from the most basic to technically complicated recipes. The Sugar Cookie is probably the cookie that every sweets baker on the planet can not only quote, but bake with their eyes closed. Sounds like a Basic to me. It’s three ingredients. Sugar, butter, flour.
You can have grappling success and not know Jiu-jitsu. If you only memorized the Sugar Cookie recipe, you would be able to cook them for the rest of your life, and you’d even have folks labeling you a successful baker. Just like you can memorize a handful of techniques in jiu-jitsu, practice them to proficiency, and have a reasonable amount of grappling success. What your memorization can mask is your understanding of the Fundamentals.
In our baking analogy what that would mean is that you don’t understand your ingredients, their purpose, or exactly how they play together to make this specific cookie. If you only memorized the recipe, your depth of understanding would be “It just does.” and if you plan to instruct one day, or grow beyond beginner level, you’re gonna have to do better than that. You’re going to have to get an understanding of what makes these things work and why you need what you need.
If you understand your ingredients – what they are, where they come from, how they react to different inputs and cooking methods, etc – you can cook all kinds of things without memorizing an entire cookbook. Are you satisfied with only having a good Sugar Cookie, or do you want to be a Pastry Chef? Do you want to have to memorize a dozen techniques, or do you want to be able to look at a problem situation and say “it doesn’t matter, I can fix it”?
If I want to pass someone’s guard, I have to create chest to chest contact once I’ve cleared their legs. You know now every guard pass. Do you need to memorize every guard pass to be able to solve that problem? You do if you don’t understand the Fundamentals behind not only what it takes to pass, but what makes a guard a guard. It doesn’t matter what open guard you deploy, the closer my chest gets to your chest, the less “guardy” you’re gonna feel.
Having said all of that, we do still have to teach backwards a little bit. We have to give the new baker the Sugar Cookie recipe and let them bake so they’ll have some initial success and see the product of their labor. If you want folks to stick around, you have to make things winnable, be novel, have a goal, and provide feedback. Droning on for the entire class period about the importance of the 45 degree angle in jiu-jitsu to a room full of people who don’t know how to tie their belt yet is a surefire way to make sure they don’t come back. We start explaining the science behind why we use white instead of brown sugar while our new cooks are excited about enjoying their fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies.
If all that happens during class is demo steps —> drill steps —> repeat, nobody is learning jiu-jitsu. That’s rote memorization, and it will fail the first time there’s any kind of resistance applied. If you want a takedown involving a single leg to work, you have to understand that you must force your opponent to put their weight over the leg you’re attacking, severely limiting their ability to sprawl or take that leg away (Typically by putting their head in line with the foot of that leg. Try it. Stand up. Lean your head over your left foot, and then try to pick that foot up off the floor. A compromised posture leads to instabilities and decreased mobility in your base. Fundamental.) You can drill an ankle pick ten thousand times, but if you don’t understand the Fundamentals involved, you’ll miss it every time your opponent doesn’t want to be taken down. Takedowns done without a clinch are the hardest ones to pull off for this very reason. “Jordan Burroughs does it.” You ain’t him and never will be, so you do yourself a favor and stop looking at the exceptions. That means that his single leg relies on athletic capability, making it not Fundamentally sound. Even he would probably tell you not to do it the way he does.
The Fundamental theory that I’m working on lately is that the positional top game of jiu-jitsu is “weight distribution created through maximizing connection” and the positional bottom game is “disrupting connections and denying weight distribution” and through those, submissions will show themselves. Having that approach as the default deployment from which the techniques are born is knowing jiu-jitsu.
Another reason that technique memorization is a detriment to your success is time. If you feel like you’re constantly a step or two behind, it’s likely because you’re trying to flip through your Roll-A-Dex to find the right answer to the problem you’re currently facing, and if the other guy isn’t doing that, it’s gonna be extremely difficult to keep pace. This is where wild scrambles come from. Neither person is sure how to respond to the other, so they just flail around until somebody lands in familiar territory. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve put myself into a safe bottom position and had folks hop from side to side, not be able to do anything, stop and say “You just gonna lay there?”. My response is usually “You gonna actually do anything besides play jumping bean?” You’re on top. Be a threat. If you can’t, that’s more of a reflection of your not having answers than it is my passivity. If you can’t be a threat to a person who’s letting you do whatever you want, but isn’t giving you gifts, do you really know the art of jiu-jitsu?
Approaching problems from a Fundamental standpoint also lets the student have exploratory sessions, and people will latch on to something that they discovered themselves. No, they didn’t “invent” anything, but the enthusiasm of discovery will make them feel like they did. Fundamental exploration is an excellent way to gamify your practice, and attempting to solve that puzzle is one of the things that’ll keep you coming back. I feel like this is one of the big contributing factors to people quitting at blue belt. They’ve seen enough techniques that they should be having success, but they don’t know enough about the Fundamentals of jiu-jitsu to make them work. So they get bored or frustrated and quit because they think they can’t learn it or it’s not fun for them anymore. I remember that feeling, and thought about quitting until I had some successes and lightbulb moments and started learning what jiu-jitsu actually is.
I could go on for a whole lot longer, but that’s enough for now. Take care of yourself.
The One Right Tool 