Jiu Jitsu is pretty intimate.

That word makes people uncomfortable, with good reason, but I don’t mean it the way most people mean it. It just means that you’re up close and personal. You can read their movement, their tension, their relaxation. You can feel their balance shift, and you can feel their momentum in one way or another.

In fact, the better you get, as I like to say, the more of a mind reader you become. You react to their movement before they even move. This isn’t magic, it’s just repetitions. You’ve seen this movement and been in this situation hundreds, maybe thousands, of times before. You body senses it, your mind reads it, your nervous system reacts, and you look like you didn’t even try.

I try to give a more simple example that people know- footballers, and more specifically, Leo Messi. Now not every footballer is Messi in the same way that not every grappler is Roger Gracie, but we need to give the best examples.

Messi is running toward a defender, he intends to dribble past him. He has a second, maybe less to decide which way he’ll go- left or right, what technique he’ll use to trick the defender, whether he’ll use a burst of speed to take the space behind him or whether he’ll drag the ball back and off balance him. There are loads of combinations he can select from. But he doesn’t select consciously, instead he reads what’s in front of him instinctively and does what feels right in the moment. There’s no possibility of conscious thought. The time is just too short.

He reads the balance of the player, sees his planting foot, feints one way, then another, adjusts for his pace… he may even read his eyes. And then he’s past him, and the defender looks like an idiot. He can also sense when NOT to try to beat him.

At a lower level, you have had some sense of that in a sport before. Basketball, tennis, ping pong! You read your opponent’s body language. At the very least if you watch someone run up to a penalty in football, you can probably tell if they’re going to hit it with power or try to place it carefully.

Now take that into the close contact of Jiu Jitsu. You can literally feel tension, you don’t have to see it. A grip loosens or tightens, or you feel breathing change, and you know your opponent is going to try to do something. You can feel them tire. You can sense their confidence fading. You might even feel that a previously tough move to defend becomes easier as the match goes on depending on their fatigue, or even their diminishing confidence in its success.

That’s what I mean by intimate. And I think it’s one of the reasons why Jiu Jitsu is so popular and addictive. You’re playing physical chess with an opponent on a subconscious level.

The better you get, the more interesting that game becomes, and that’s certainly why I love it!

See you on the mat,

Barry