The Art of Destruction: Why Fundamentals Create Intelligence in Jiu-Jitsu

As a jiu-jitsu coach, one of my biggest challenges isn't just developing my students' intelligence - it's creating the experiences that enable true learning to emerge. Every student brings different variables to the mat: their emotional state, training frequency, mat time, life experiences. But here's what gives me confidence: everyone has a brain, and therefore everyone has intelligence. Given enough time, jiu-jitsu can work on anyone, and anyone can work on jiu-jitsu.

The catch? While everyone has intelligence, few understand how their intelligence works, let alone how to develop and apply it to jiu-jitsu. R.W. Young defines intelligence as "the faculty of the mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered." This perfectly describes the beginner's journey in jiu-jitsu - you start in complete disorder. But as you learn, your intelligence begins crafting solutions, often surprising ones, that address an increasingly diverse set of problems. The results of this process are remarkable: clever, ingenious, insightful, and simple answers to complex physical puzzles.

My coach Chris Haueter captures this in his definition of BJJ: "the art of controlling and submitting - in that order - utilizing the least amount of attributes (strength, explosion, size, and youth) and the maximum amount of technique, learned knowledge, leverage, cunningness, and guile."

Pay special attention to that last part - cunningness and guile. These qualities demonstrate a deep understanding of jiu-jitsu, the ability to set up opponents well in advance. That kind of foresight requires immense computational power!

Attributes, while necessary, should not provide the bulk of your power because they are finite. They might accidentally produce an intelligent answer from time to time, but true intelligence creates reliable solutions that go beyond mere recipe-following. It develops new recipes, adapting to situations and solving problems in innovative, and efficient ways. So what are the unifying formulas that underlie jiu-jitsu intelligence? The answer is one I mention in almost every class I teach: fundamentals.

The fundamentals can be defined as pre-existing foundational case studies that illustrate how jiu-jitsu works at its core. A group of people who likely cared about jiu-jitsu more than us figured them out through practice and observation, and passed them down in the DNA of the art. They serve as simplified, universal examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of key principles - base, posture, leverage, connection - providing starting points for solving more complex scenarios. These cases are the proven self-evident truths of jiu-jitsu, showing what works reliably and why, allowing practitioners to build their understanding and decision-making on a stable foundation.

Without fundamentals, you're not just playing without knowing the rules of the game - you're multiplying the amount of computation you have to do by the tens, which leads to overwhelm and increases your attribute usage by a similar margin. Why? Because jiu-jitsu requires you to look ahead, and without a foundational understanding, it just continues to generate more and more moves and countermoves, forcing you to compensate for this lack of clarity. The fundamentals collapse this complexity, allowing you to look ahead strategically without unnecessary effort.

When you're training, think of your roll as a tree. As you and your partner move, you're both generating that huge move-countermove tree with many branches and thousands of possibilities - leaves. The reason jiu-jitsu seems so hard at first is because you have no way to stop its overwhelming potential, you either become a helpless observer or you try to fight the beast head-on with attributes. This is not sustainable. You need a way to filter out ineffective or irrelevant options. The goal isn't to grow the tree; it's to prune it by recognizing fundamentals and their signals, which help focus on only the most effective and actionable options. This turns exponential growth into fruitful growth, to continue our tree analogy.

We augment this process through what Haueter mentioned in his definition: learned knowledge, or technique. Techniques act as pre-tested solutions or "shortcuts" that reduce the need to compute every possibility during a roll. They provide structured examples of how to solve specific problems, allowing you to layer these techniques onto your understanding of fundamentals and refine your decision-making process.

Instead of starting from scratch with every scenario, the techniques you learn serve as additional branches of knowledge that help you focus on high-probability moves. Over time, with practice and rolling, you incorporate these techniques into your process, learning not only when to apply them but also how to adapt them to dynamic situations. This augmentation accelerates growth and minimizes unnecessary computation and attributes.

We need techniques because we don't have enough time to create them on our own in the beginning - we have to make decisions quickly once we start rolling. When coach shows that underhook, use it...immediately. Eventually, once we internalize the patterns found within the fundamentals and match them to the patterns found within the techniques, we'll be able to use them to create our own patterns, but don't try to recreate the wheel. This process will be the hallmark of your jiu-jitsu intelligence: selecting relevant information carefully so that you can skillfully and purposely destroy the rest.

The interesting thing about jiu-jitsu is that the goal is to develop the ability to reduce hundreds of possibilities—each representing complex, continuous streams of movement, pressure, and intention—down to a single, decisive action. Just as a neuron processes a massive amount of input and distills it into a simple "fire or don't fire" decision, a well-trained practitioner learns to filter the chaos of a roll into a clear response. This reduction is purposeful and necessary. It simplifies decision-making, allowing you to act efficiently without hesitation. Through training, drilling, and positional sparring, you develop the ability to recognize the fundamentals, which help you collapse the complexity into actionable opportunities. The result is not just faster decisions but better ones, rooted in clarity and purpose rather than reaction or guesswork.

There is entirely too much raw data in human movement (and a steady stream of strong and athletic young bucks being born everyday) to keep dealing with it all through attributes.

If you're trying to match strength with strength, speed with speed, there will always be someone younger and more athletic coming up. So we continually have to destroy this complexity, feeding those results to the next level, and becoming intelligent machines. This is honestly how you get to the black belt level in jiu-jitsu.

This is why you may hear a commentator speak of a world champion, like Adam Wardzinski for instance, as having only one good move, the butterfly sweep. Of course this is hyperbole - his skill has come from years of evolutionary pruning. The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligence in jiu-jitsu, and how we evolve from wielding a sledgehammer to mastering a scalpel - our tools becoming more precise through intelligent pruning.

Remember, jiu-jitsu is an iterative process, a pattern, which means it repeats itself. It was built by humans, our brains designed specifically for pattern recognition. Many people believe they need a PhD in physics, a protractor, and calculator to do jiu-jitsu the minute you bring up angles and leverage, but think about it: did you need that to catch a baseball or swish a jumpshot (Kobe)? No, you computed all that in your brain using pattern recognition. The more you train, the more time you give yourself to recognize the patterns, eventually becoming someone who learns what is necessary to solve and what is not, a key to intelligence. This is what allows someone like Adam Wardzinski to be able to hit the same sweep on just about anyone, in a myriad of different ways.

As you embark on your journey of becoming a black belt with one well-honed technique (a culmination of hundreds of internalized fundamentals), you may find yourself going through hundreds of iterations making little to no progress, and then suddenly - as if you had a hint of inspiration - things click and a solution appears. That's your fruit, the product of patience and intelligence recognizing order in what was once chaos. And in all fruit there is a seed - the fundamental truths at the core of every technique. Replant it over and over again, let it grow through proper training and pruning, and watch your jiu-jitsu tree become more fruitful with each passing season.