Jiujitsu Made Simple: Understanding "Balance"
What poorly designed tables can teach you about maintaining base
“A Table with 3 Legs Falls on its own accord”
Understanding balance is as simple as understanding a well constructed table. I got this concept about 10 years ago, a while after Nic Gregoriades wrote the Black Belt Blue Print. I reached out to him with some ideas and he sent me a copy of his book.
We exchanged some ideas over the next year or so and he eventually sent me a copy of an instructional he was working on called “Beyond Technique”. It was supposed to be an instructional primarily focused on “conceptual learning” as opposed to procedural learning. Concepts versus procedure were the main topic of our back and forth emails.
Back then, it was really Nic and Kit Dale that were focused (read: marketing) the conceptual aspects of training since a lot of the instructional material back then was focused on procedural learning.
If you’re unfamiliar with the difference: Conceptual learning means understanding the broader concepts to why things work. Procedural learning means understanding the steps, from point A to point B involved in making a thing work.
In other words, a concept for a “sweep” means you go from bottom guard to top guard and that is that. Conceptually, any guard position where you go from bottom to top means that you have swept your opponent. Procedurally, however, you will need to know the steps. Step one, grab the collar. Step two… and so on.
As you can imagine, concepts are much easier to learn and this is why Nic and Kit were aggressively marketing and selling their instructionals on conceptual jiu-jitsu. And it was great.
Which leads me to that first quote.
That quote belongs to Nic in that instructional, Beyond Technique.
He was attempting to explain that a poorly designed table has a weak base in contrast to a well designed table.
More specifically, the concept was conveying that if you, as an attacker want to weaken the base of a person, you have to remove one of his legs —in this case, a “post” (arm or leg).
This is where the metaphor comes in; if you remove a point of base (we’ll just call it a post from now on), you substantially weaken your opponent’s ability to maintain balance. Therefore, in the transition from four to three posts, the center of gravity needs to be shifted within the center of the new three posts.
OR, the attacker will be able to pull the center beyond those three posts and finish the sweep.
In my opinion, balance is simply where center of gravity is in space, within an opponent’s present posts.
Back to the table metaphor.
If you consider a table with four legs, in theory, for it to have perfect base, the center of gravity would have to be in the center of that table. If you remove a leg, because a table is static, the center would be right at the support line of those two posts. If you remove yet another post… well then the base becomes even weaker.
In this situation, all it takes is a slight nudge towards the corner of the removed post and the table will topple over. If that second post is removed, then the table becomes off-balanced in two directions and easily toppled over.
The “Secret” Behind Off-Balancing
So, your goal is to find out how to remove posts and move your opponent’s center of gravity beyond those posts. For paid subscribers, this will be an excellent reference here. For everyone else, I’ll briefly explain how to simplify off-balancing.
You/Your Opponent will generally have 2, 3 or 4 posts.
When standing, you’re on two posts (your legs). Therefore, in order to off-balance, you’ll ever need to remove weight from one post OR, move your opponent’s center of gravity beyond the strength of the posts (IF standing straight up, forward or backward).
As a rule, always consider that if an opponent’s hands are on the mats, they’re off-balance. The reason a hand is on the mat is because their structure is unstable. In this case, you can consider their base being a table with 3 legs. Here you’ll have to figure how to move their center of gravity between the posts OR, remove the post (in this case maybe the hand on the mat) and finish the sweep.
This is the same principle with four points of contact to the mat.
I hope this email was helpful. Beyond the paywall below, there will be a couple of videos (about 12 minutes total) highlighting all of this information above.
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