Introduction
Brazilian jiu-jitsu practice began in May 2024. At the ARTA Hiroo, starting once a week, the habit has now settled at three times a week. The current rank is white belt with two stripes. It was taken up after turning fifty, and two years on, a few things about the use of the body have become clear — some of them overlapping with what yoga and Rolfing had been pursuing, and some of them entirely different.
How It Started
The immediate trigger was Joe Rogan. The host of the most listened-to podcast in the world has repeatedly urged people to take up jiu-jitsu. Listening to the show, that suggestion stayed with me.
There is also a far older memory: watching Royce Gracie in the UFC and Rickson Gracie in PRIDE. At the time I knew almost nothing about jiu-jitsu as a sport, but it was visible even then that something other than overpowering the opponent was at work. Opponents who were larger somehow became unable to move. It never occurred to me that more than twenty years later I would be verifying what that something was through my own body.
How the Classes Run
The classes at the academy run an hour, in several formats.
The drills and technique class is technique practice alone, for the full hour. The fundamentals class has a short period of sparring, and the all-belts class devotes half the time to it.
The one I mainly attend is the drills and technique class that starts at 7 a.m. There is the practical reason that the day begins by moving the body in the morning hours, but more than that, the fundamental movements have a quality entirely unlike yoga postures. That point is taken up in the next section.
The instructor of the early morning class enters through defense. Not techniques for attacking, but the shapes that keep a person from being broken down, the shapes for escaping. These are instructive as fundamental movement. Learning to protect first makes it possible to see what is happening when attacking.
Practicing breakfalls matters for the same reason. In jiu-jitsu there is a constant stream of being thrown, taken down, and flattened out. Unless the body has learned a shape for landing safely through all of it, the practice itself cannot continue. Breakfalls belong to the most unglamorous category of technique, but whether they are in place sets the ceiling on how much practice is possible.
What Ashtanga Was Missing
This came up in an earlier piece on the relationship between yoga and Rolfing. The Ashtanga primary series is built around the sagittal plane — forward bends and backbends, the front-and-back movement. The elements in the transverse plane (rotation) and the frontal plane (lateral movement) are relatively few. Repeating this skewed pattern over many years engraves the skew into the fascia. Noticing this around 2014, after about eight years of practice, is what set off the search that led to Rolfing (see “Yoga × Rolfing Gateway ── Why Is There a “Layer That Cannot Be Reached” Even After Continuing Yoga | 20 Years of Ashtanga, and the Encounter with Rolfing“).
The fundamental movements of jiu-jitsu sit exactly in what was missing. The shrimp is rotation of the pelvis together with lateral displacement; the bridge looks like a backbend but in fact carries a twist toward one side. The technical stand-up shifts the weight diagonally while exchanging the points of support. On the floor, the body turns, slides sideways, and twists. The territory the sagittal plane never reached is at the center of the practice.
Beyond that, a yoga asana is essentially complete within one person. A symmetrically arranged shape is built inside one’s own body. The movements of jiu-jitsu presuppose an opponent. For a body that had done yoga for more than twenty years, this was an entirely new load. In terms of the balance of the body, it is very good.
Learning and Forgetting
Techniques are practiced and forgotten, over and over.
The technique from last week is already gone by the start of this week. The order skips. The hand is in the wrong place. And yet, oddly, the movement gradually becomes clear. It is not held in the head, and still the body begins to move toward the shape.
This process closely resembles the period of learning the Rolfing work. The procedures taught in the basic training, carried out at first while checking them repeatedly, at some point begin to run without checking. When that transition happened is something that can only be seen in retrospect. The same thing is happening in jiu-jitsu.
And thinking makes it impossible to do anything. This became clear almost immediately after starting. The moment a thought forms during sparring — “now that technique” — the body stops. The opponent moves through the gap. What the body has learned, what can be done without conscious thought, comes out far more readily.
Getting it into the body takes time. Two years in, this one point turns out to be immovable. There is no shortcut.
It Is Also a Thinking Sport
At the same time, jiu-jitsu is a thinking sport.
Thinking makes it impossible to move, and yet without thinking there is no winning. The contradiction dissolves once the location changes: the thinking happens not during sparring but before and after it. When the opponent arrives in this shape, what options are available? The number of those options is the skill itself.
This is presumably why jiu-jitsu is so often compared to chess. Every technique has a counter, and every counter has a counter to it. From the same position, the path branches according to how the opponent responds. It is a sport that tests how large a repertoire a person has. With only one answer available, it ends the moment that answer is taken away.
So the techniques that are practiced and forgotten are not wasted. A shape thought to be forgotten will surface in some particular situation. It is not being pulled out by the head; the situation is pulling it out. Expanding the repertoire does not mean lengthening a list held in the head — it means increasing the range of situations the body can respond to.
Judging Distance
The largest realization of these two years has been how distance from the opponent is judged.
Jiu-jitsu is a grappling art, so the bodies are pressed together. But being pressed together does not mean there is no distance. Too close and too far both make the technique fail. There is an appropriate distance, and it differs every time according to the opponent’s build, posture, and center of gravity in that instant. Judging this distance is at the center of the technique.
And judging it requires a reference on one’s own side. Watching only the opponent yields nothing. Where are my own feet; what is behind my back — the grip has to be taken while sensing these. As long as the head is chasing the opponent’s movement, distance cannot be judged.
In the Rolfing Advanced Training, Finding Back Space was given as one of the ways of cultivating Neutral. When awareness leans too far into the here and now, the body contracts and pitches forward. Deliberately sensing the space behind returns the center of gravity to the middle.
The phrase never surfaces on the mat during practice. But comparing afterward the days that went well against the days that did not, the difference lay there. On the days when the back is available, there is room in relation to the opponent’s movement. On the days when only the front exists, it ends with being driven back.
Respect and Territory
There is one more thing distance has raised.
What does it actually mean to apply a technique while respecting the opponent? Jiu-jitsu is a sport of controlling another person, but the other person is not equipment. The body one grips with has its own territory. There is a difference in quality in how that territory is entered.
An earlier piece on peripersonal space took up two layers, the Territorial Body and the Body of Action. Around the body there is a layer held as one’s own territory and a layer that extends outward in order to act. Judging distance in jiu-jitsu is nothing other than handling both at once: entering the opponent’s territory while holding one’s own (see “Space Is Felt Differently by Each Person — Tonic Function and Peripersonal Space“).
This is the same as what happens in a Rolfing session. To touch is to enter another person’s territory. Entering it having lost one’s own can only be an intrusion. Before the question of what the technique does comes the question of what state the touch is delivered from, and that is what determines the outcome.
For the one working and for the one grappling, what is required does not change. Realizing this has been the largest gain of these two years.
Releasing Force, and Not Getting Injured
The more accomplished the practitioner, the better they are at releasing force.
Sparring with the higher belts, no force registers at all. There is no sensation of being pushed, and yet movement has somehow become impossible. Conversely, the newer the practitioner, the more force goes in. That was true of me. Trying to solve things with force means colliding with the opponent’s force, wearing down, and getting injured.
What came across from watching Royce and Rickson was presumably this. Nothing looks like overpowering, and the opponent stops being able to move. It could not be explained at the time; now it can be, a little.
People who are good at releasing force get injured less. The correlation is plain from watching the academy. A body with force in it cannot respond when moved in an unforeseen direction. A body with the force out of it can travel along with that direction.
Three things seem to matter for avoiding injury. First, having breakfalls in place. Second, using the whole body — trying to do something with the arms alone, or the legs alone, concentrates the load on that part. Third, stretching. It sounds obvious, but the more the practice volume grows, the more its importance registers as something felt.
Starting something new in one’s fifties forces an awareness that the body recovers at a different rate than before. That is a constraint, and at the same time it is a motive for looking for a way of moving that does not rely on force.
Remaining a Beginner
The third year is about to start. At white belt with two stripes, gripping with the higher belts still means long stretches of being able to do nothing. Being able to stay in that state is, in fact, the good part.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. Shunryu Suzuki’s words, learned during the Rolfing training, come back on the mat again and again. A body that has been offering Rolfing for over ten years rolls around on the floor as a white belt in an entirely different field. Having a place where a great many failures are possible is valuable as an occasion for approaching things with humility.
At some point I would like to compete, borrowing the chests of many people along the way, and improve little by little.