Iconic Vs Fundamental: What do we actually teach new students

Iconic Vs Fundamental: What do we actually teach new students?

I am back to finally having some time and energy to write again, but now I am going to do that thing we all learned in like 5th grade for writing essays where we define a word to establish our premise. And that word is Fundamental, which of course refers to the core, foundational base of a system or concept. It describes something that is essential, primary, and of central importance upon which other elements depend. So what does that mean in relation to Jiu-jitsu? How do we determine what a fundamental technique or movement is? We talk a lot about teaching students good fundamentals, but I don’t think as a whole the Jiu-jitsu community really grasps what that is.

In my opinion the community focuses more on what I would call Iconic moves and calls those moves fundamentals, when they actually are not. Fundamentals should be the building blocks of your Jiu-jitsu game, and as part of that, I don’t really think there are a lot of named moves that are actually fundamentals. One of the first moves I remember learning in Jiu-jitsu was the arm bar from guard, and I was told this is a fundamental move of Jiu-jitsu. As a white belt I didn’t question it, but as a black belt I think a lot about this kind of thing. I think the armbar from guard contains many fundamental movements and concepts and is used to teach these ideas to students but it is often not conveyed to the students that is what they are learning as part of the armbar.

In this way I think the armbar from guard has become an Iconic move of Jiu-jitsu where it is a move many students learn early in their Jiu-jitsu career, and most interpret as a fundamental move. However the armbar can be mechanically complex and many students learn it and then do not utilize it in grappling for significant periods of time. This is because as an Iconic move of Jiu-jitsu most students learn this move fairly early on and practice it a lot, making it an easily recognizable and defendable move. So when a new student learns the move, and then it immediately gets stopped when they are grappling, consciously or subconsciously they decide that it is not a move they will use.

If we look closer at the armbar from guard we can see that it contains a lot of fundamental concepts in it that we can use throughout Jiu-jitsu and it can be used as a tool for teach those concepts as well as taught to newer students, we just have to shift our focus in how we teach the move. I would argue that the main fundamental concepts as part of the armbar from guard are, controlling your partner’s posture, isolating a limb to attack, utilizing angles for leverage, and maintaining tightness throughout to prevent escape opportunities. Teaching these things as fundamentals builds a stronger foundation in which to build your Jiu-jitsu house.

When we do an armbar from guard, the first thing we have to do is control our partner’s posture, because a partner that can sit fully upright is going to be very difficult to armbar. So we can use different techniques and positioning to learn how to break down someone’s base and posture to bring them close to us, which also applies to many other Jiu-jitsu moves and positions. From there we have to isolate our partner’s arm, learning how to separate their limb from their body in order to control it and to put it in a position to armbar. Again this is a move that is applicable far beyond the simple armbar and very effective in many different positions.

After we have isolated the arm, we generally cannot just throw an armbar from directly in front of our partner, we need to move to the side and gain an advantageous angle in order to be able to properly armbar them. Again this is a skill that benefits both positional control as well as other moves in Jiu-jitsu. And finally we need to learn how to maintain tightness in our moves, without just squeezing as hard as you can, to prevent having large openings where our partner can escape.

When we talk about fundamentals, all of these movements are more valuable in isolation for a broader scope of Jiu-jitsu and how we utilize them as part of the framework we use to define Jiu-jitsu, however they are often not discussed as part of initial training or they are held off until a later time. I think that if we break moves down and explain how these concepts benefit the growth of the student, these fundamental movements will benefit our students far more than simply teaching them the moves we first learned when we were starting out.

A lot of the moves that I learned early in Jiu-jitsu I would see now as Iconic moves of Jiu-jitsu where I think of fundamentals much more as the concepts of how these moves work. I think utilizing these iconic moves of Jiu-jitsu as tools to explain to your students how to think about and how to utilize fundamental movements and concepts is a better use of these moves as opposed to just teaching them these iconic moves.