The Game of Jiu Jitsu

A little over a month or so ago, one of the newer guys (Tashiro-san) was complaining about how it hurt when I had him in knee on stomach – even when we were just drilling a move and I was trying to go as lightly as possible. Amazon heard him complaining – this wasn’t his first time – and said, literally, “your HP is too low, Tashiro. You need to level up.”

Between this and the Street Fighter 2 humming, I’m thinking that Amazon is a bigger gamer than he lets on. But he has a good point: Fighting is a sport, and a sport is a mix of a game and physical activity. Since I also play a lot of video games, including a lot of Street Fighter 2 and its innumerable spinoffs, it’s only natural that I think about MMA as a game. Sometimes, I find, it helps me figure out where I need to improve, and how to make sure I’m playing to win.

I usually start out by thinking of a player first in terms of his or her physical strength – that is, their body’s capacity to do work. Given a fight between two completely untrained cavemen, the one with more physical strength is going to win the fight more often than not. No matter how much some people downplay physical strength while talking about martial arts, the fact is that it’s damn important – important enough for our sports to be segregated by weight class, since we can control for strength to a certain degree as it correlates with bodyweight to make for more even matchups, and thus, more exciting fights. Even the most experienced BJJ players out there will probably remember a time when they felt like they were starting to get the hang of this BJJ thing, and then some new guy who weighed like 100lbs more than they did but didn’t know anything somehow managed to kimura them from inside their own guard. Yeah, not the slickest way to win – and certainly not one that’s going to win you a whole lot of approval by your instructor – but it happens, nevertheless.

What training in the martial arts does is give you a force multiplier for your raw physical strength, by teaching you how to apply your strength in particular ways. If the cavemen fighting from our first example don’t know where to hit each other, they’re going to be fighting for a long, long time. Striking can be renamed “learning how to produce force with certain harder parts of our body to inflict damage on the opponent in certain places”, and submissions can be considered “learning how to leverage our body’s physical strengths against our opponent’s weaker body parts” – e.g. attacking the leg at the joints instead of trying to break the bones, or choking them out instead of trying to crush their lungs at the ribcage. Training can be considered a strength amplifier - while our body is still capable of producing the same amount of force overall, we’ve got a better idea of how to use it more efficiently to prevent ourselves from getting beaten. Thus, while training is important, it’s not the end-all.

What’s more, “leveling up” our physical strength, or our technical ability, tends to be something that follows the law of diminishing returns; while we’ll be a better BJJ player the more we train (not taking into account physical aging, etc. for now, anyway), if we train five days a week every year, we’ll see our net improvement gradually decrease each year. Again, this isn’t to say we’re getting worse, but rather that we learn more in the beginning because there’s more to learn. This comes from personal observation, nothing more, so feel free to chime in if you disagree. Likewise, training strength directly (weight training, etc.) sees dramatic gains in the first few years year or so, but after that the gains taper off dramatically. So if you’re a lifelong gym rat, lay off a bit and spend that time training, and vice versa – if you’re one of those skinny BJJ technicians (i.e. me), take a day off and do some deadlifts – to maximize your time spent.

The “game” comes in when we pit fighters against each other, of course. But it’s not as simple as taking the physical strength and modifying it by the training multiplier, oh no. As they say, styles make fights, and for good reason – the way someone plays the game determines whether their final adjusted strength comes into play at all. To take the early UFCs as a clear cut example, Royce Gracie might have had lower adjusted strength than anyone else in the tournament, but his gameplan put him in positions that gave him specific strength bonuses that helped him win out. That is to say, even though I just generalized “training” as a general “strength amplifier”, the truth is that it’s more complicated than that; we train ways to use our strength in specific situations that give us an advantage and our opponent a disadvantage. Whoever manages to get their opponent in that situation and keep them there long enough to end the fight wins.

Let’s take the basic BJJ positions as an example; we have guard (in all its various incarnations), side control, mount, rear mount, and knee-on-stomach. At my last competition, I generally chose to go to my guard first, because even though it’s considered a neutral position at best, I’ve practiced how to leverage my strength mostly from that position, giving me a bonus there. If my opponent isn’t very good at guard passing and sweep/submission defense, then we could take what originally was an even position (say, five points to five points) and give me +1 and my opponent -1, or 6 to 4. The larger my advantage gets in any particular position, the harder it is for my opponent to win the fight – and the less time and ability they have to redirect the fight into a place that’s at their advantage. And, no doubt, they’ll have to exert more energy to do that, too.

After all, strength is a finite resource – our bodies get tired when we fight. Run out of energy, and you’ll lose, too. But, exert the maximal amount of energy at the right amount of time – being “explosive” – and that might get your opponent in a situation that they just can’t muster up the energy to escape from, like, say, however hundreds of pounds of force needed to perform a bicep curl against an armbar.

I kind of forgot where I was going with this, but now I want to make a collectible card game out of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Hmmm.

pat m.