When you watch sports, where do you focus your attention?
I find myself inevitably drawn to the ball.
Football is the classic example. I sit there staring at the place where I know the center is holding the ball beneath him, ready to snap it into the quarterback’s hands. The ball isn’t even doing anything. There’s motion in the backfield on both offense and defense, and I couldn’t care less. I’m blindly awaiting the moment when the ball leaps into action and the play “begins”. This hyper-focus on the ball continues all the way through the play. The quarterback isn’t simply important because he’s tall and highly paid, or charming in that rental car commercial, or the “general on the field”, he’s important because he’s the one who holds the ball.
Its a bit different when watching jiu jitsu. For one thing, I play the game myself, so I can appreciate the nuances that I miss while watching football, which I never played.
But also, there isn’t a ball. Which means there isn’t a dedicated object that demands the viewer’s attention. So as a spectator, where are you supposed to place your attention?
If you’re wondering why it even matters how you watch…
How you focus your attention while watching dictates whether you’re simply being entertained or whether you’re setting yourself up to learn from your observations. Its a matter of degrees of focus.
Starting from outermost viewpoint, you can watch with relaxed eyes, not keying too much into either player’s specific actions, but seeing things more as a flow of forces. Each player is a wave crashing against the other. A yin and yang where the one is trying to consume the other. This can be fun from a purely experiential perspective but can be hard to glean any technical knowledge due to the grainy level of detail. (Though if you let your intuition guide you, the moments that “feel” interesting in this mode of observation likely have the best details for deep dive in later study.)
The next option, and I think the most common is that you watch one player to the exclusion of the other. Maybe you have a favorite in the match so you focus on her activity, rooting for her successes and bemoaning her failures, always seeing the other player through the frame of reference of how their actions impact your favored player.
Getting more fine-grained in our observation, we can task our attention to always focus on the person on top or the person on bottom regardless of who it is. Now we are getting away from cheering for the sport and distinctively into the realm of studying technique.
Last we have the level that I am currently finding very rewarding. Instead of watching the total action of the bottom player, naming for yourself the guards they’re using and the sweeps or submissions they’re attempting, try watching just one part of their body. For example, watch the guard player’s legs, looking not at what guard they’re in, but what orientation they maintain to the opponent, what paths they take to move from one control point to another, what control points they choose to inhabit.
This mode of observation is not for the faint of heart.
It takes a surprising amount of work to keep track of this, especially when you’re watching the new generation of top tier lightweights. Those kids are quick! But if you want to grow your jiu jitsu into more than just regurgitation of rote memorizations, a robust attention span is necessary. If you can’t make sense of a skilled guard player’s legs while you’re watching, how can you possibly expect to conceptualize positioning for your own game planning, and even more importantly, how can you expect your body execute your chosen moves during live rolls?
This narrow focus method isn’t just for film study. Next time you’re on the mat, try focusing on just your legs. Keep your hands relaxed so you aren’t over-committing to your opponent with grips and your elbows close your ribs to avoid giving up easy passes.
Then forget about your hands.
Forget about what guard you’re playing.
Forget about sweeping or submitting.
Focus on connecting your legs to your opponent’s body in ways that inhibit their ability to pass. Control the area behind their knees. Control the area in front of their hips. Connect your feet to their feet. Hook your feet onto their biceps, their armpits, their neck. Keep your feet moving and keep your attention moving with them, think of this more as a flow exercise than a guard exercise.
Don’t worry about “retaining guard”. Inevitably, guard retention will happen. But for starters, the hyper-focus on how to connect and how to move from connection to connection is more important than the success or failure of the opponent’s passing attempts. Do this exercise during positional sparring so you can keep resetting back to the guard and don’t even have to worry about the success or failure of your retention.
This is how you develop the body awareness that supports the execution of specific techniques
Body awareness is a skill. As is athleticism. So much of what the casual observer dismisses as natural talent is a consciously developed skill of coordination, not an innate trait of physical superiority.
The sooner you shift your thinking on this topic and start training these qualities that underpin your specific skills, the sooner you’ll develop the smoothness that you admire in the people who are currently better than you.
Good Hunting,
Charles Batey
Thank you.