Understanding the human body in BJJ

Understanding the human body in BJJ

Understand where the human body is strong and where it’s weak and you’ll go far in this game. We tend to think of people as strong or weak per se, but each one of us is only as strong or weak as the positioning and posture of our body at that time. For example, the arm of the strongest man is made weak when it’s put behind his back. The fastest man is made slow when his ankles are tied together. Take every opportunity to put your opponent into a physically compromising position and those impressive physical attributes of his will be severely degraded to a level you can manage easily. Deepen your understanding of these positions of weakness and soon you’ll be able to exploit them to your advantage on the mat. At the end of the day, it all comes down to technique. You will get better at it as you progress. Like if you can’t keep your posture while fatigued but can when you are not fatigued then you are simply not doing it right. Again, it will come with more practice. Nobody has it all figured out. Everyone is still learning as well, you will still be learning well after you earn your blackbelt. Everyone still gets fatigued and sometimes our technique falls apart. But knowing that it is a matter of refining our technique is the important part. For example, if you move your hip forward so that your knee, hip, and shoulder are all in a straight line and your whole body is angled away from your training partner then it is really difficult to pull you forward and break your posture. You can keep this position without any strength but as soon as your hip drops back even a small amount then you will come crashing down. This is an idealistic position but the concept is correct. In practice, you need to make small adjustments to deal with your training partners movements but that is all part of figuring it out. The quicker you start understanding the human body in BJJ, the better you will be.