Curveballs and Jiu-Jitsu

As Firas Zahabi of Tristar Gym in Montreal explains in the below video, becoming a truly formidable fighter is all about surprise. True, perfect execution of technique will almost always allow a person trained in jiu-jitsu to dominate someone with no formal training, but it won’t necessarily work against someone who knows the move just as well. In fact, if your opponent knows what to expect because your style is so predictable, then you are at a disadvantage.

There is a parallel here to baseball—particularly the art of throwing a curveball. When done well, hitting a curveball is one of the most difficult things to do in the entire world of sports. There are three main reasons why: the movement of the ball, the speed of the ball, and the context of the pitch.

Movement

Pitchers will spend years learning how to use the right grip and apply the correct amount of spin and pressure on a ball to get it to move how they want it to. It requires a lot of practice to get the ball to drop (or break), and it requires a lot of precision to get the ball to drop right before it crosses the plate. If the ball breaks too early, the batter will track it and the curve will be useless. If the break occurs just before it crosses the plate, the batter will either miss the ball or they’ll watch it drop from above the strike zone to within the strike zone.

Speed

At the Major League level, the typical curveball travels at a speed of around 77 mph (the average fastball is closer to 90 mph). As a result, a batter will have a few milliseconds to track and guess the trajectory of the ball before they begin swinging. For a 90 mph fastball, the window of opportunity where the batter has to decide if they are going to swing is 25 milliseconds (about one fortieth of a second). A blink lasts 100 milliseconds. 

Context

The psychology of pitching is all about surprise. Of course, the batter knows that a pitch is coming, but they don’t know what type of pitch to expect, its location, or its speed. Pitchers not only want to keep this a secret until the ball is thrown; they also want to fake out the batter and make them think a completely different pitch is coming. As a result, they do everything they can to make all their deliveries look exactly the same and will often try to set up a certain pitch—meaning that they give the impression that they are going to throw one thing, and then throw another.

If a pitcher can make a batter commit to chasing a fastball, and then throw a curve with the right movement, the batter will have no time to adjust or respond effectively.

Bringing it Back to Jiu-Jitsu

What does any of this have to do with jiu-jitsu? It turns out a lot.

Success in combat sports requires more than just your natural abilities. Being really strong or really quick is only going to get you so far if you don’t have technique that you can rely on. This is where coaching becomes absolutely essential to the development of a fighter. It doesn’t matter if that fighter is learning jiu-jitsu, boxing, wrestling, or a mix.

How a coach develops a successful fighter is very similar to the three elements that make up a good curveball. Their first responsibility is teaching their students the fundamentals. Those fundamentals include the techniques or moves that really define the type of martial arts they are doing. These techniques are similar to learning how to put movement on a ball. Getting the mechanics right requires a lot of repetition and drilling.

A coach should also teach students how to do these moves quickly. Just how a pitch is only effective if the batter does not have a lot of time to track it, the techniques for any martial art are only effective if your opponent does not have time to defend against them or counter them.

Finally, a coach needs to work with students to help them develop a series of strategies to catch even experienced fighters by surprise. Similar to how a pitcher tries to fool a batter over the course of an at-bat rather than just one pitch, a fighter will come into a fight with a strategy or a style of fighting that they’ve developed with their coach, who recognizes how to match that style with the fighter’s body type and personality.

Finding the Right Coach

If your coach is the type of person who only knows one way to train a fighter, every fighter who comes out of their program will fit that one mold—some better than others. Firas notes that they can be very competitive, but they are not particularly unique. As he explains, if you’ve gone up against a fighter who came from the instructor’s school, you will know what to expect. Moreover, you are unlikely to see a student from such a school make it to the top.

Gordon Ryan, meanwhile, started learning leg locks through John Danaher’s program at a time when leg locks were underutilized. Firas believes that those leg locks have been a big reason for his success and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. They ultimately gave Ryan an edge that other fighters struggled to blunt. Fighters could not just revert to familiar patterns to defend against his innovative attacks.

Developing an entirely individualized style may not be absolutely necessary for fighters hoping to compete at the highest level, but it certainly helps. It allows you to more precisely modify the techniques of any martial art to make something unique and unexpected in a competition where surprise is everything.