🛫 Jiu-Jitsu on "Autopilot?"

What happens when we grapple without thinking

The nomadic (and enigmatic?) Margot Ciccarelli was back on the BJJ Mental Models podcast this week!

Margot recently started driving, which was no easy feat for her: she suffered a serious car crash back in 2022 and has had a phobia of driving ever since.

In our chat, Margot explained how challenging driving a car is for her. She shared how her biggest obstacle is the amount of brainpower and focus required. She finds it extraordinarily taxing mentally.

If you’re a longtime driver like me, you probably feel the opposite way. After decades of driving, it’s easy for your brain to “go on autopilot” when you’re behind the wheel. When driving becomes second nature, it’s way too easy to zone out, and that can be dangerous!

But I was like Margot once. I remember getting my driver’s license and feeling the same way when I got behind the wheel. When you’re a new driver, the experience is terrifying. There’s so much stimulus for your brain to process, and it’s all new, and the stakes are so high.

It’s funny, Margot and I have the opposite experience when it comes to the gentle art of Jiu-Jitsu.

When I watch the way she competes, I’m just amazed. I can’t imagine being able to move so fluidly, and without having to slow down to think about it.

For me, Jiu-Jitsu has always required effort and brainpower to understand. Take it from me: you don’t spend the better part of a decade building a Jiu-Jitsu mental models resource unless you need it. 🤣

I guess that’s the difference between a world-class athlete and the rest of us. A professional spends so much more time perfecting their craft, even amongst black belts.

This whole process of mastery — the “journey to effortlessness,” I suppose — is something that Josh Waitzkin (a Renaissance man and Marcelo Garcia’s first black belt) talks about in his excellent book, The Art of Learning.

He calls this process “form to leave form:” practicing a movement form so deeply that you internalize it, and can do it without thinking.

In this way, we master the form so that we can one day leave it. After enough practice, once-difficult techniques become so ingrained that we can do them without thinking about the details.

You can probably type effectively, but can you recall the exact order and positions of the keys? Probably not, unless you really think about it. That’s a great example of “form to leave form.”

With enough practice, we can even do the most complicated activities on autopilot.

And the cool thing is: once you reach that level of mastery, you can abstract that once-complex idea into a building block for bigger ideas!

I bet you struggled with armbars at first. It felt like there were so many steps and details, all of which you must do perfectly together.

But with enough practice, all those details meld together into a single tool: armbar. It develops its own identity as a concept, and you don’t need to think about the steps anymore.

Now that we’ve “left form” by making a complex thing simple, we can take the concept of armbar and start to build even more complex concepts on top of it: armbar from mount, armbar from guard, short armbar, inverted armbar, choi bar, etc.

This is how we learn Jiu-Jitsu. We train concepts until we can do them on autopilot. Through effort, we turn those complex patterns into simple ideas. Then, using them as building blocks, we reach for the next level in our understanding.