Studying athletes is an important part of your development. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the better you get. In the Blue Belt Life addition of Studying Athletes, you were tasked with looking for the physical. What physical strategies, grips, and techniques are being utilized? What patterns do you see? You were honing in on specific exchanges and breaking them down. This takes practice and discipline.
At purple belt, it’s time to level up your analysis. Your job is to study your athletes' decision making. This may sound like a strategy analysis, but it goes further than that. Your athlete may be changing strategies, be taken out of their game, or be put in desperate situations. Then what?
By now you should have some experience studying a group of Jiu Jitsu competitors. To start studying decisions, you need to identify an athlete's strategy, and then find all the times that that strategy is not in play, or being put to the test. For example, an athlete could heavily rely on their passing game, but they were taken down and are now in bottom half guard. This isn’t their normal strategy, but now what? High level players will still have a game here. An example of a strategy being put to the test may be a guard player is fighting for a sweep. This is their game. But they are down by 3 and there are 40 seconds left on the clock. Here, you get to see decisions in action.
In these moments there are a few questions you can ask. 1) Do they stick to the plan under pressure? 2) When placed out of position, do they play it or funnel themselves back to their A-game? These are strategy questions. There are technical questions to pose as well. What happens when techniques are failing? Do they stick to it or transition?
Technical Examples
Your athlete is in straight ashi and is attempting to expose the heel. Their opponent turns out to relieve pressure. Do they stick with the rotation? Do they transition to a new position? Is this a consistent decision when posed with the problem multiple times?
Your athlete is trying to pass with a knee cut, but just can’t get past the knees. Do they transition to toreando? Do they get inside control of the knee? This is a matter of problem solving the challenges they face under high pressure.
Strategic Examples
If you have a defined strategy for your athlete, you are looking for moments when the strategy changes, or they are taken out of it by their opponent. How does the scoreboard and time clock effect impact their decisions?
I find the ticking clock one of the most interesting times to observe strategy. Do they stick to the plan and risk the clock running out, or completely mix it up and go for broke? There are no right answers to what your athlete should do. An example of this could look like in observation is an athlete trying to sweep from open guard. They need to sweep to win. Time is running out. They have been in this position for 2 minutes to no avail. These are moments where the most crucial decisions are made. A famous example of this is Amy Campos sinking in her hook to finally get back points and win ADCC. If you haven’t seen this, you have homework to do.
Other scenarios impact strategic decisions. An athlete that normally likes to shoot for takedowns may employ a different strategy against someone with a strong front headlock game. A common strategic change you will see is when someone faces well known leg attackers. Their passing changes. Their gripping changes. Can you define how your athlete makes different decisions when faced with this threat?
The Source
Your athletes movement will reflect your athletes decisions, but there is a lot more going on in the mind of a high level athlete that you don’t see. One of your tasks as a blue belt was to seek out instructional content from athletes you are studying. This content will give you insight into how they view problems and outline their decision tree. Part of your process should be to make the connection between the game they outline and the game you see. Any opportunity you have to gain insight you should take, and can sometimes come from social media, podcasts, or YouTube. Listen, read, watch. Get everything you can from the source and help it inform your study.
Make Predictions
This is one of the most powerful tools in analysis. The intention is not to be a test. The intention is to freeze frame a moment and analyze all the options available, consider the most likely options, and then consider what your athlete would do. This is a skill that helps you assess your athlete, but also Jiu Jitsu in general at a higher level. This can be done at various points in the match for different reasons. Assessing a moment before an exchange, mid exchange, in a bad position, etc… all lead to asking different questions.
One of my favorite times to do this is at the beginning of a match. Before contact is made, I pick an athlete, pause and assess. What is their posture, stance, and foot placement? Are they going to shoot, pull, or start to exchange grips? This prediction can be made with a pretty high level of certainty. Does your athlete respond differently depending on their opponents likely stand up strategy? Are they reading their opponent?
Once control is established, the prediction game is a little easier. If your athlete likes to work a head and arm choke from mount, and they get to mount, then there is limited value in this prediction. Finding pre-engagement, scrambles, and bad positions are key areas in the match to focus on.
Make Progress
Studying decisions helps you understand a plan under strain. A perfect plan is an ideal limited by resistance, energy, and time. When the ideal hits its limits a plan doesn’t fail, it expands. It creates more branches on a decision tree. Learning to read these decisions and map them out helps you understand the structure of a strategy.
At a high level your decisions dictate your success. You have spent plenty of time learning techniques, and even more time refining them. It’s not just how technique is performed that matters. It's when and why. It's the stringing together of options you present to your opponent in a way that challenges their own thought process. By studying the decisions of the best performing athletes, you will begin to think like them. This process of studying decisions will be one of the most important factors in expanding your Jiu Jitsu understanding.