BJJ: Disjointed thoughts on progress

[haggholm]

I’ve been doing regular no-gi for months now, and (I’m sure I’ve said this before) it’s been tremendously good for me. In gi, my worst fault was that I was too slow and passive. In no-gi, with sweat and low friction and no gi to grip and hold on to, the game is much faster and being slow and passive will cause you to lose immediately every time. Having immediate feedback has helped me become much more active, and this helps me just as much in gi as in no-gi—the latter just proved an easier forum to develop this attribute in.

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The other week I had several things click. After over two years, I suddenly felt like I understood triangles (I’m not saying I am good at them, but as the world’s slowest learner it seems to have taken over two years before I really understood the basic principles, in particular how to move my body to cut the angle—and with my somewhat short and thick legs I have to get that angle right to close my triangles at all). Underscoring that, minutes after telling someone I’ve never, ever landed a triangle in rolling I tapped someone out with an inverted triangle. I don’t even know how to do an inverted triangle, in theory; I couldn’t demonstrate it. But apparently, the principles have somehow been sufficiently ingrained in me that when the opportunity presented itself (during someone’s failed guard pass), I just went there without thinking about the how. (I also caught someone else in a triangle that I would have finished in another ten seconds, but for the fact that the bell rang. For someone who failed to catch anyone in an effective triangle in two years, two in a week isn’t bad.)

I had a similar experience with a weird sweep I pulled off when, for some reason, I decided to stay for the beginners’ class (after my regular intermediate and advanced classes); it was similar to a pendulum sweep but involved my rolling back over my shoulder and landing in reverse kesa gatame. I don’t know if it has a name and I have never done it before or since, but it seems I’ve gained enough experience and perceptiveness that, when I felt my sparring partner off balance, I reacted instinctively to use that to sweep him, however unorthodox (or just unfamiliar) the move itself may have been. Click!

Similarly, working an ankle pick that I can’t recall ever working before, with a beginner, it took me all of one attempt to gain sufficient understanding to explain to him why his first attempts didn’t work. Not talent, but a few years of training has ingrained even in my martially challenged brain some understanding of balance and off-balancing. Click! (The beginner in question then proceeded to get it right and won’t be struggling with those basics for two years…)

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I’ve now decided to at least try to make a habit out of going to three classes back-to-back, rather than (as before) two, if I can; certainly at least once a week. There are three reasons for this. One is that more mat time is good; more experience is better. Another is that I could really use some work on my cardio and endurance, and I can think of no better way than to simply do more BJJ.

The third reason is that going specifically to the beginners’ class is helpful to me. As someone with (I still firmly believe) much less than average talent, rolling with my contemporaries can sometimes be a bit dispiriting. There are lots of people who started long after I did who are by now much better than I am. This tends to give me the illusion that I’m making no progress. But that’s not true, of course—I am making progress, just not as much as people who train harder or have more talent than I do. Going back to rolling with beginners gives me a better sense of how I have improved relative to a fixed point (viz., the general skill level of untrained people or people with <N months of experience) rather than a moving target (individuals who are also improving, perhaps faster than me). And I realise that though many of these beginners are probably much more talented than I am and will swiftly overtake and surpass me, right now I can kick their asses. That tells me nothing about them (they will learn, after all), but does tell me that I have learned, because a year ago I could not have kicked the asses of (say) many two-stripe white belts as I now can.

As an addendum, I also think that fighting beginners is good because it allows me a chance to work very weak techniques, like sweeps that I have no chance at all of pulling off on people at my own skill level. My pendulum sweeps are so weak as to be nigh nonexistent; therefore I look for them when I spar beginners. (If I attempt them at people around my own level or better, my attempts will not only fail but also lose my position in a comically inept and disastrous fashion.)

I generally feel that, contrary to the dictum of some, that always fighting the best opponents available is not a great way to proceed. Instead, I want to fight people who are somewhat better than me, or anywhere down from there in skill. Of course I need to fight people who can beat me, to challenge me and force me to develop my defence. Of course I need to fight people at my own level so I can get some properly competitive rolls. But I also feel that I need to spar with people below my level of experience because it gives me a chance to work the techniques I’m particularly bad at, and because it keeps my self-assessment realistic rather than hopelessly pessimistic. (Similarly, in fencing, I like to take the opportunity to fight left-handed when I’m facing a raw beginner.)

This is not to say, of course, that I take some sort of sadistic pleasure in beating up newbies and making their lives miserable. On the contrary, while I do try to score once or twice to avoid getting lazy, I try to give them opportunities to exploit so that they don’t suffer my own problems (getting so used to failure that I tend toward passive defence), and to point out the one or two most glaring problems they have, if any present themselves. (I try to resist the urge to lecture, as it’s rude and I’m poorly qualified; but I figure that it’s OK to say Make sure you pull with your knees or First and foremost, break my posture.)

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From the very beginning I’ve described my progress in martial arts, and jiu-jitsu in particular, as perseverance in the face of a daunting lack of talent. I still think it’s an apt description, but I also now think that, slow though that journey may be, the first results are finally becoming visible.