Brad C

Grappling post!

I think when the broader grappling collective talks about “defence” in BJJ we tend to misunderstand the whens and whys of the topic. It's really common to have a round where someone fires off nine or ten submission attempts, someone gets out of all of them, and the conclusion is “Wow that guy has really good defence.” I don't disagree with the assessment that submission defence is a core component of a broader defensive picture, but I think it does a disservice to a broader group of skills.

To contextualize this, after an 18 month (or 20 month whoops) “sabbatical” where I dropped down to only doing jiujitsu twice a week, I've been starting to ramp back up. I don't have any designs on competing any time soon, but I want to feel sharp again, I want that satisfaction of knowing I'm hanging with genuinely very good grapplers. As weird as it sounds, I kinda miss perpetually feeling just a little beat up. The past few years have included a myriad of knee, back, and neck injuries, and I'm inching ever closer to 40. The years before the sabbatical included a lot of injuries due to a combination of training too much, too hard, with people much bigger than me, while (quite frankly) underweight/undermuscled for what I was doing. This is all coming to a head where I have made peace with my old style of jiujitsu, with a heavy emphasis on berimbolos, inverting out of problems, and relying on flexibility and “burst” to get through problems, as simply not being a viable path forward anymore. I am a hobbyist black belt in a room filled with young, hungry, skilled, and athletic grapplers so chasing the meta feels somewhat pointless.

My new project, in part to be of service to the room but also in part because it gives me something to focus on, has been to get asshole good at the turtle and defence generally. The vision is to be really really hard to score on, to the extent that the young guns will find in competition that consolidating the score on their opponents isn't as hard as consolidating the score on me. This focus on being a defensive stalwart has made me spend a lot of time thinking about what do we count as successful defence. The best way I've found to organize my thinking has been to use hockey as an analogy, being the true patriot I am. How I've started thinking about this is as a game that's in OT. A goal ends the game, just like a submission. Likewise the puck would be analogous to having the tempo/initiative.

Goalies, in this analogy are submission defence. A good goalie can be relied upon to dismiss non-credible threats, a great goalie can bail you out from a near-certain goal with an emergency save. It doesn't matter how good the rest of your roster is if you are icing a guy with a .850 save percentage that gives up random softies. (Hello 2006-07 Tampa Bay Lightning)

A good D corps/sound team defence in your own end, would be good positional escapes. It doesn't matter how good your goalie is, as much as possible you want to limit the number of shots they even face. The shots that you can't stop should be as low-quality as possible.

Playing in the neutral zone, or the left-wing lock/trap, is having a good turtle/positional defence to tease the analogy a bit. You may not have the initiative, you may not have the puck, but if you can force the other team to dump-n-chase or otherwise give up the puck that is absolutely a success. Fans hate it, but good neutral zone play has been a cornerstone of some of hockey's craziest upsets.

The forecheck is guard retention. You don't have the puck, but you are working very hard to take it back and take it back in a dangerous position. People with good guard retention seamlessly flow from defending the pass and right back into being a threat.

Finally, having the puck in the offensive zone is sorta the rest of jiujitsu. Attacks, submissions, passing, etc. The fun stuff that makes highlight reels.

I like this analogy for a bunch of reasons, but among them is that it pushes two ideas that I have come to really like; First, if you don't have the puck you are constantly trying to force the other team to lose the puck. If I am not the one with the initiative forcing the action I am constantly trying to take it. Second, counters do not exist in this framework. You never give up a 2-on-1 or a breakaway in the hopes that you can send your own back the other way. Similarly you should never, ever, allow a credible submission attempt in the hopes that you will counter with a submission of your own. (Emphasis here on “credible”) Just like how sometimes there's a shot on net from the blueline, I'm quite content to present a shape that looks like a sub opportunity in the name of positional advancement.

Jiujitsu, broadly speaking, places a huge emphasis on offence, a huge emphasis on the forecheck, and a huge emphasis on goalies. (Offence, retention, submission escapes.) There is some mention of the importance of positional escapes, but almost no mention ever of positional defence as a concept. What I'm trying to do right now is to get really good at playing in the neutral zone, getting to a point where you may have the initiative but it isn't threatening and if you get too excited I take it back.

It's hard.

It's also really fun.