Mastering Jiu-jitsu

(Credit: Adapted from George Leonard’s Mastery, 1992, pp 6-17, replacing the original tennis example with jiu-jitsu. This is a tribute to Leonard's philosophy, intended for the BJJ community to enjoy.)

Say you are in fairly good shape but by no means a highly conditioned skilled athlete. You have played around with movement sports such as badminton and basketball, which involve hand-eye coordination, and you’ve done some combat sports, but not much — which might be a good thing. Now you’ve found a jiu-jitsu teacher with a good reputation of grounding fighters in the fundamentals, and you’ve committed yourself to three classes per week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. You're on the path to mastery.

It starts with baby steps. The teacher shows you how to break a fall — he has you squat low, tuck your chin, roll onto a curved back, and slap the mat with palms at a forty-five degree angle. He explains why it is important. He then paints an image of someone sitting on top of you, and proceeds with showing bridging and shrimping. He shows you how to plant your feet correctly, and how to move your shoulders and hips together as a unit. He fusses about the inside position with your elbows. He makes corrections, gives encouragement. You feel terribly clumsy and disjointed. You have to think to keep the parts of your body synchronized, and thinking gets in the way of graceful, spontaneous movement.

You find yourself becoming impatient. You were hoping to get exercise, but this practice doesn’t give you enough even to break a sweat. You want to dominate people, but your teacher says you shouldn't even be thinking about that at this stage. You're the type of person who cares a lot about results, and you seem to be getting hardly any results at all. The practice just goes on and on: make frames, make grips, get the inside position, bridge and shrimp, create space, take space, retain guard — you seem to be getting exactly nowhere.

Then, after about five weeks of frustration, a light goes on. The various components of basic attacks and escapes begin to come together, almost as if your muscles know what they should do; you don’t have to think about every little thing. In your conscious awareness, you're hitting moves faster and smoother. You start to grasp that jiu-jitsu techniques are absolute, they work regardless of who applies them. Now you have even connected some dots from the previous classes. You feel the itch to start competing.

No chance. Until now your teacher has been handing positions to you. You haven’t reached those positions on your own. But now you’re going to have to learn guard passing. You will learn new frames and new grips, and how to move correctly to get past a guard. Again, you feel clumsy, disjointed. You’re dismayed to find that you’re losing some of what you’d gained. Just before you’re ready to call it quits, you stop getting worse. But you’re not getting any better either. Days and weeks pass with no apparent progress. There you are on that damned plateau.

You realize you came to jiu-jitsu not only to get exercise but also to look good, to roll with your friends, to beat your friends. You decide to have a talk with your teacher. How long, you ask, will it take you to master this thing?

Your instructor responds. “Do you mean how long would it take for you to automatically get into good positions and hit submissions?”

“Yes.”

He pauses. It’s a question he always dreads but gets asked a lot. “Well, for someone like you, who starts jiu-jitsu as an adult, if you participate an hour three times a week, it would take, on average, five years.”

Five years! Your heart sank.

“It's going to be a lot of drilling and rolling but you will have to stay consistent in class. Of course, if you’re particularly motivated, it could be less than that.”

You decide to try another question. “How long will it be before I can roll competitively?”

“Competitively? That’s a loaded term.”

“I mean rolling to beat a friend.”

“I would say you could probably start finding submissions in about six months. But you shouldn’t roll with winning as a major consideration until you have reasonable control of defense and escapes, guard passing and retention, and moving through positions. And that would be about a year or a year and a half.”

Another bitter dose of reality.

The teacher goes on to explain. The problem with jiu-jitsu isn’t that you have moves and attacks, and you have to master all of that, but also that your opponent has moves and attacks. It's physical chess. A lot of practice time on the mat is spent getting smashed. A roll with darker belts lasts only about a minute or two. But trying to beat a friend really comes down to who makes a silly mistake first, like exposing the neck or extending an arm. You don’t get much practice. What you really need is repetitions of techniques under fairly controlled circumstances at every step along the way: posture, footwork, takedowns, guard passing, pinning positions, controlling positions, setups, finishing mechanics, leglocks, strategy. And even before these: defense and escapes. And the process is generally incremental. You can’t skip stages. You can’t really work on strategy, for example, until you’ve got controlling positions pretty well under control. With the introduction of each new stage, you’re going to have to start thinking again, which means things will temporarily fall apart.

The truth begins to sink in. Going for mastery in this sport isn't going to bring you the quick rewards you had hoped for. There’s a seemingly endless road ahead of you with numerous setbacks along the way and — most important — plenty of time on the plateau, where long hours of diligent practice gain you no apparent progress at all. Not a happy situation for one who is goal-oriented.

You realize that you have a decision to make at some point along the journey, if not now. You’re tempted to drop jiu-jitsu and go out looking for another, easier sport. Or you might try twice as hard, insist on extra lessons, practice day and night. Or you could quit classes and take whatever you’ve learnt to the mat and just have fun with your friends who don’t roll much better than you. Of course, you could also do what your teacher suggests, and stay on the long road to mastery. What will you choose?

The Mastery Curve

There’s really no way around it. Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it.

To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so — and this is the inexorable fact of the journey — you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

Source: Leonard, George. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1992.