Grapple.NinjaHow I Learned To Stop Planning And Love The Chaos
Introduction
Editors Note: I am stoked to share a special guest post by my former training partner and newly promoted black belt, Charles Batey. Charles has always been an exceptional training partner—unorthodox in his techniques but a fierce competitor who constantly challenged and humbled me during our sparring sessions. His dedication to jiu-jitsu is evident not only in his recent promotion to black belt, but also in his insightful and engaging blog (Jiu Jitsu Field Guides), which covers a wide range of topics with skill and depth.
In this post, Charles shares a snippet of his journey and the lessons he's learned along the way. His prowess on the mats shines through in both unpredictable and beautifully creative moments, always keeping you guessing. I admire and envy his unique approach to jiu-jitsu and life. Charles's philosophy is a refreshing reminder that sometimes, the best plan is to have no plan at all. I am sure you will find his insights as valuable as I have.
1
My elbow got popped in the very first match of my first-ever jiu jitsu competition.I was a white belt, and up until that competition, perhaps 9 months into training, I had been injury free. Lots of pain, mind you, lots of getting smashed and pretzeled by larger, stronger, more skillful training partners, lots of bruised ribs and sore neck muscles, but this was my first “real” injury.
In spite of my rapidly stiffening right arm, I opted not to drop out of the round-robin style tournament and proceeded to lose the remaining four matches by submission. It was a woeful showing. I went home with a record of 0-5 and my first significant injury. I might have been justified in asking if jiu jitsu was really for me.
I don’t recall seriously considering quitting.
I was justifiably unhappy about the record of losses, but what really bothered me was that I didn’t feel like I represented myself well. If I had played up to my standards and still lost, that’d be disappointing but acceptable. Instead, I had gone out there and played a low-quality game that I didn’t even recognize.
Prior to that first competition I was neither self-critical about the strengths and weaknesses of my game, nor was I curious about the world of jiu jitsu outside my home gym. I resolved to do better. I set myself the task to develop enough skill that I could show up to a tournament and, win or lose, at least represent my game faithfully. I wanted to be able to play just as smoothly during competition as I did on any given day in the gym.
That first competition was a harsh wake-up call, and that early resolution to be a better competitor has impacted my approach to the game ever since.
2
But damn if jiu jitsu hasn’t proven difficult to wrap my head around.The game is too big to develop skill in all the phases and positions at once. This size and complexity force us to develop only a few areas at a time. We can rationally periodize our training to keep from neglecting any one aspect of the game for too long, but before we can map out an effective periodization scheme, we have to be able to read and interpret the terrain.
Spoiler alert, in case you think this process gets easier, I’m more than ten years into this journey and I still get lost from time to time.
But since you’re a subscriber to GrappleNinja, I’m going to bet that you already have one of the most important tools for navigating the complex terrain of jiu jitsu. You have the skill I began refining in earnest after my big competition failure.
You have self-reflection.
Congratulations! You’ve already done the hardest part. You’ve done the thing that I couldn’t make you do if I wanted to. You’ve decided to care enough to look at yourself critically.
Now, on to the other hardest part. How do we put this self-reflection to constructive use?
We start by being honest about where we are and specific about where we want to go. Honest self-reflection (i.e. self-reflection without self-deception) is its own can of worms. Let’s save it for another day and just talk about where we want to go. In a game as deep as jiu jitsu, I could make a very long list of potential destinations, but let's try (and inevitably fail) to keep this simple by focusing on win conditions.
If all you wanted to do was win, you’d want to narrow your endgame down to the smallest number of the most effective submissions and focus on getting to them from anywhere, ignoring the many scenic detours that others might take, things like artistry, community, and even fun.
Sounds straightforward. But is it?
Let’s say you’ve chosen to make your entire game consist of getting to the back and strangling for the finish. At a minimum you’d need to train:
- finishing mechanics,
- subtleties of the handfight,
- leg hooking variations to control your opponent’s hips,
- offensive transitions to the back from
- Guard
- Standing
- Side control
- Mount
- Turtle
- Various leg entanglements
- not to mention opportunistic transitions from losing positions,
- and of course out right escapes from losing positions to get back to neutral positions in order to re-initiate your back attacking
How many win conditions does jiu jitsu have? Tens? Hundreds?
3
At the beginning of a recorded lecture, Alan Watts once issued a warning to his audience. He told them that he was about to deceive them, that nothing he was going to say would be capital-T-True, that especially when his arguments resonated most strongly with the listener, they were simply words, words that aimed at a thing. His words might promise a route to insight, but the words would never be the insight itself. That was the deception.When we attempt to navigate the terrain of jiu jitsu and codify routes to victory, we engage in a similar deception.
Consider the kneebar. A cursory reading of the terrain reveals that back attacks are some of the strongest submissions available. So a broad route to success in jiu jitsu might look something like, “Don’t turn your back to your opponent.” And yet, the kneebar is an undeniably powerful submission in which the attacker’s back is facing their opponent. Another general route to success made less certain by the kneebar might read, “In order to secure top position, you need your hips higher than your opponent’s hips and your hips must be facing towards them.” This is especially relevant in scrambles, where one player may be winning the height while the other is winning the orientation. Whoever gets both pieces first usually wins… except when the kneebar is in the mix.
Perhaps we can add a caveat that these two sample routes are valid except if one player has two of their legs around the other player’s single leg. But what about the fifty-fifty leg entanglement? You’re witnessing the exception cascade that inevitably results from treating any of our routes as capital-T-True.
The classic strategies that follow the formula of “Pass. Pin. Isolate upper body appendage. Submit” are still relevant, and the two routes described above are still accurate, in spite of the kneebar threat, but they cannot be followed blindly.
The terrain of jiu jitsu is too nuanced to safely follow predetermined routes without exception. The deeper you dive into the fine grained details, the more you’ll need to revise your map. Every time you revise, you’ll have to zoom back out and see where the shifting lines of reasoning have changed the terrain. There will be lines that insist on overlapping confusingly, or that refuse to come together to form tidy edges. The map will always have areas that refuse to be filled in.
If you’re like me, the failure to fully fill in your map is going to keep you coming back to the ever important skills of self-reflection and note-taking.
You’re still going to try to map the game to nth degree, despite the apparent impossibility of the task. You’ll establish some routes that seem to go with the terrain, and you’ll build some strategies that allow you to travel safely along those routes. Then, a few practice sessions later, you’ll start to see the pitfalls that weren’t immediately apparent.
Here there be dragons.
4
The first time I found one of these dragon’s lairs, I didn’t know what to do about it. First I tried to simply work around it, but my preferred routes to success became increasingly weighed down by detours. Then I tried to get more careful in defining the edges, thinking this irrational zone might just be an artifact of my imprecision. But that just weighed me down with exceptions.Avoidance wasn’t the solution. Neither was more knowledge. A deep dive was the only good option remaining.
I stopped playing jiu jitsu with the aim of defeating my opponent and started playing with the aim of investigating these zones that didn't conform to what I thought I knew. I’d give away whatever advantages necessary in order to get myself into the dragon’s lair and stay there.
I had originally hoped that these deep dives would help make better sense of the map as a whole. They didn’t. Much of the experience gained within these dragon’s lairs proved to be case specific. Sometimes lessons could be extracted and generalized, but more often, what I learned was to be less attached to which route I was on and be more comfortable in the chaos of the moment.
I’m nowhere closer to a unifying theory of jiu jitsu strategy than I ever was, and the map still isn’t free from dragons. It isn’t meant to be. If we succeeded in completely mapping the terrain, we wouldn’t have a game left to play. The novelty, creativity, and enjoyment would be dead. Optimization towards winning would be the only thing remaining.
In the old stories, dragons are always guarding treasure. The same is true with the irrational zones of our strategic maps. Don’t be afraid to challenge what you think you know about jiu jitsu. It will surprise you.
. . .
Good Hunting,
Charles Batey
P.S.
Jiu jitsu philosophy and strategy are some of my favorite topics of conversation. If you’d like to chat, email me at charlesabatey@gmail.com. Also, I publish my notes from training and coaching on substack, where you’ll find about two years worth of an archive including the occasional strategic deep dive, and even a series applying the lessons from Sun Tzu’s Art of War to jiu jitsu. You can subscribe at https://jiujitsufieldguides.substack.com.