BJJ and Balance
I must’ve had a severe case of ADD when I was a kid. One day I dreamed of being a firefighter. The next I would imagine myself strapped in a space shuttle rocketing towards the moon. The list goes on, baseball player….race car driver…chippendales dancer (I guess that last one is more of a nightmare than a dream).
Anyways I ended up choosing something a little less exciting… mechanical engineering.
Now I didn’t choose this path because it was the easiest. I chose it because I like fixing and fiddling with stuff. And mastering the fixing and fiddling of things meant I couldn’t also fight fires, travel in space, play ball, drive really fast or learn to dirty dance like Patrick Swayze.
You can be a jack of all trades or a master of one. But there’s just not enough time in the day to be both.
That’s why the idea of “balance” interests me so much. The word suggests that you don’t have to pick and choose. That you can have it all. I imagine a balanced person has a well paying job they love…an active social life…well reared kids…and is in tip top shape.
But have you ever really met someone like this?
I don’t think I ever have. Usually people are fractional in their successes. A few examples:
– The guy with lots of friends, a great hobby, a well paying job but no time to exercise and stay healthy.
– The woman with a good job, good health and a stable family but no social life.
– The bodybuilder who spends three hours a day at the gym, goes out partying all the time but who is absolutely broke.
Rarely do you see the person who has it all…something’s almost always gotta give.
That’s why I think balance is a big myth. It’s like communism, great in theory but it just doesn’t work in the real world. And it doesn’t work in bjj either.
For example, look at world class grappler Marcelo Garcia’s game. The dude is a back choking animal. Or Roger Gracie’s cross chokes from mount. Or – in the MMA realm – Aoki’s footlocks or Sakuraba’s arm locks.
The lesson from this? If you want to be a master, you must specialize.
Most of the top level guys finish fights with just a handful of submission. While I’m sure they know other techniques, they sure don’t use them when they’re going against the best. They bring their A-game.
Which begs the question…are they balanced fighters? Or have they trained just one or two techniques so much that they can basically say, “I’m going to take your back and choke you and there’s nothing you can do about it”.
That’s not balance. That’s domination. And you can’t be that level of a badass if you spend your training time working on dozens of moves in the hopes of developing a “balanced” game.
Me! I fit the above discription
except I have no children, but then again I don’t want any 
I like where you are going with this. Balance should be a tool, not a goal. The goal is happiness (to me, at least) and sometimes I have to tip the balances to achieve it.
Also, someone once said the problem with grapplers is that sometimes they use a ruler to measure a journey of miles, so what may seem like imbalance (when viewed within a narrow context) may indeed be a very balanced action if one takes a 10-20 grappling career in perspective