BJJ Mental Training: Kuzushi, First Principles, and Anticipating Reactions

Mastering the Core Concepts to Elevate Your Game

At the core of most BJJ techniques, you can usually recognize a couple of fundamental principles guiding the movement, no matter how flashy it is.

I firmly believe that to "hack" the BJJ learning curve, you need to understand these "first principles" or fundamental concepts deeply.

If we strip away the crazy lingo and slow things down, we can see that, at its core, BJJ is simpler (not easier) than we might think. Concepts like kuzushi can be observed in almost every single BJJ technique.

This leads to another important point: we should broaden our understanding of these principles instead of learning techniques like recipes. It's not that we won't learn how to apply these fundamentals to specific techniques (we will, once we're proficient), but it's more important to learn in a way that’s transferable to other techniques. Learning concepts and fundamental principles is the most efficient and adaptable way to learn BJJ – and anything else, really.

We do not want to be one-trick ponies who rely solely on muscle memory. We want to be effective grappling problem solvers. The only way to achieve that is by understanding what’s happening and having tools that work in many situations.

I am still catching up with the IBJJF Worlds matches, but this match, and more specifically, this move, made me think of this.

Getting to a blue belt’s back (or someone who has trained even briefly) is usually super hard.

Now, imagine getting the back of an absolute black belt world champion contender. Yet, we see that Roberto used a mix of removing one of Rayron’s bases, kuzushi, getting under his center of gravity, and forcing a reaction that even a white belt knows to avoid: overextending his arms and leaving an underhook opening. Rayron knows this is undesirable, but he has no choice but to react.

I love breaking down a match and a move that I find impressive into simple first principles. It exercises the part of my mind that solves BJJ problems 🤓.

Give it a try!

NEWSLETTER UPDATE:

I haven’t been able to stick to my regular writing and studying schedule for the past few months. A lot is happening in my personal life (all great, thankfully) that has interfered with my regular schedule. I will do my best to be as consistent with the newsletter as possible, but keep in mind that the core commitment of the newsletter is to post high-quality, useful content. I refuse to post anything that I don’t believe is good, so please forgive my recent inconsistency.