Techniques:

Shadows on the Wall of Kano’s Cave

BJJ practitioners love the technique. Techniques and positions get treated as almost mystical fetishes; physical spells that must be cast just right for the smaller person to defeat the larger. But when we encourage grapplers to focus on technique, we are almost always encouraging them to ignore what actually matters - the specifics of the situation they are in.

Grappling is a continuous flow of movement and intentions; it needs to be broken up into discrete parts in order to be discussed. These parts form the language with which we communicate about jiu jitsu.

The basic unit of the BJJ vernacular is the Technique (I’m going to group both techniques and positions under the term Technique).

Technique definitions are based on large, relatively obvious limb positions.

• Back on the ground and legs around the opponent’s waist? Closed Guard.
• Legs around the opponent’s head and arm? Triangle.
• Kneeling with your opponent pulled across your shoulders, belly-down? Kata-guruma.

There are variations and details, but in the vast majority of cases, you can look at a photo and accurately determine the Techniques involved.

Black Belts learned to grapple in this language, and it is the one they use to describe their success. When we go to the experts to learn, we naturally assume that they know what they are talking about, and that they know how best to talk about it in the first place.

Dividing a continuous system into a language will usually come with trade-offs. For example, a language with ten symbols allows for more nuanced communication than a language with just two. The trade-off is more work transmitting and decoding these more nuanced messages.

One of the great strengths of the BJJ vernacular is that it is easy to teach to beginners. Because the definitions are static limb positions, they can be understood quickly. A day-one beginner may not be able to use Mount effectively, but you can put him in a recognizable Mount position with only a couple minutes work.

This ease-of-introduction hints at what we are giving up by using this language.

The fact that you can put a novice into a recognizable Mount position is proof that “Mount” includes garbage jiu jitsu. I have felt training partners give up superior control in a scramble in order to solidify an inferior "real" position, because they believe that's where the jiu jitsu is.

Mount, Side Control, Arm Bars, Closed Guard – all of it can be performed terribly. You might say that a garbage armbar is not a “true armbar”, like that Scotsman we’ve all heard about. I understand that small nuances can make or break an arm(bar), but that is my point: we don’t use these small nuances to define an armbar, we use the large limb positions. In fact, when applied under full-resistance, we find these nuances to be fluid, winking in and out of existence depending on the situation.

This is a feature of every Technique in BJJ – everything can be done poorly, and has some “invisible jiu jitsu”, some situation-specific modification, or just one last detail that the Professor will show in class today.

The high number of unique specifics is the tradeoff made in the BJJ vernacular. Every Technique has its own set of situation-dependent nuances. This gives the BJJ language a high level of irreducible complexity. I believe that these nuances are like the epicycles added to geocentric planetary motion.

I think there is some set of dimensions that is orthogonal to the Flatland of BJJ. If we centered our grappling language on something other than Technique, I believe the epicycles would disappear.

The careful, detailed study of Technique is like putting a finger under a microscope, trying to get a better view of the moon it is pointing to.

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Of course, I could be completely wrong about that. In fact, we would expect a fake blue belt to be wrong and 100 years of BJJ to be right.

But now that I see BJJ as Flatland, I can’t unsee it, and am dedicated to finding these hidden jiu-jitsu dimensions.

In order to test this assertion (that the current BJJ language is just one of many possible languages, and a sub-optimal one at that), I will suppose that some malicious Professor of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.

I must start with a clean slate, no techniques or positions imported from the authorities.

Then carefully choose a small set of principles, all of which are assumed to change over time.

Lastly, gather data about them by testing them in grappling experiments.

I can use high-level grappling as a reference point. I am throwing out how experts talk about grappling, not the obvious fact of their grappling ability.

I think of this like the early heliocentric models of the solar system; ultimately they had to predict the same planetary positions that geocentric astronomers had observed throughout history.

So my first reference point: a fully mature FJJ should look very similar to BJJ.

Without an outside, authoritative source of Truth, I have the problem of verifying my experimental measurements. I might import underhooks as a fundamental principle, then be so bad at jiu-jitsu that my data indicates "underhooks don’t matter".

While astronomers have always been observing the same planetary patterns, the exact nature of those observations has changed over time.

For a while there was very good reason to suspect that the Earth actually went around the sun, but the geocentric model was so well-developed that if you wanted to know where Mars was going to be tomorrow night, the geocentrists had a much more accurate answer. Improvements in telescope technology (among other things) enabled more nuanced observations, which allowed for better models and eventually practical utility.

My second reference point: I should consider the quality of my data to be heavily impacted by my physical grappling literacy. As I conduct experiments, my ability to feel what is going on will become better calibrated, and I can be more confident in my data.

Once I have determined a more optimal grappling language and have a well-calibrated athletic sensitivity, then I should be able to create fake jiu-jitsu on the fly, without ever properly drilling Technique again.

The mat is a night sky, I’m a telescope, and most people are looking at fingers.