Mini Ep. 73: Tipping Points

Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in jiu-jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in jiu-jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And today I want to talk about tipping points. This is a really important mechanical concept in jiu-jitsu that has a lot of implications to your strategy as well. You've probably heard the term before, Malcolm Gladwell published a great book with the same name, although he didn't invent the concept. I mean, this is not new, but it's very relevant to jiu-jitsu. And the idea of a tipping point is that once you have achieved sufficient leverage or momentum, your desired outcome can no longer be denied. So what we mean by that is that techniques have a point of no return where it becomes unrealistic that the defender is going to be able to stop the technique once that threshold has been crossed. I'll give you some relevant examples. If you're standing up with someone, there are a lot of judo throws that involve loading the person's body weight up onto your hips. So you're using your hips as a fulcrum and then they tip over your body weight and that's how the throw works. If someone attempts one of those throws on you, at first you have the ability to defend it, but once your center of gravity is on top of their hips, it gets very hard to stop the throw now. You might be able to move with it and keep your base, but you have to change your tactics once your body weight is loaded up onto your opponent's hips. Another example is when you are trying to defend a guard pass. You might have heard someone talk about the headlights when talking about guard. Um, what this often means is think of your legs up to the point of your knee as headlights that are shooting out beams in front of you. If you want to be able to keep someone within your guard, they need to be inside those beams. And basically what that means is you can't let them clear your knee line. If they manage to clear your knees and get past those headlights, now it's going to be easier for them to get to side control and secure the pass. So for a guard pass, the tipping point when they can complete that pass would be when they're able to get beyond the headlights, the angle projected by your knees. Knowing the tipping point is important because if you continue to cling to a failed strategy beyond the point at which it's useful, your odds of success go way down, and it also can open up other risks for you as well. Another relevant example is having a headlock on someone is almost always a good thing, but if they're able to take you down and pass your guard, holding onto that headlock is no longer a good idea. Now you're exposing your arm and you're opening yourself up to a Von Flue choke. So you have to recognize that that tipping point has occurred and then bail out and switch to a different strategy. Beginners sometimes get tunnel vision, they get really focused on completing a technique and they hold onto it well past the point when the tipping point has been crossed. And that is a huge mistake. Knowing the tipping point of all of the techniques that are being done against you and knowing when to change your strategy is absolutely key. So for example, going back to guard passing, if someone clears your knee line, now you need to start thinking about, okay, do I just shell up, close up my elbow knee connection and turtle and then try to reguard later? I can either turtle towards them or turtle away. Do I try to change the angle so that I can wrestle up? Do I have the flexibility to hip out and maybe do a high leg? There are other options, but the most important lesson is knowing when the tipping point has been crossed and changing your strategy. So for any technique that is used by you or against you, I would consider trying to figure out where the tipping points are. What is the threshold where that technique no longer becomes viable? Because both the person applying the technique and having it applied to them need to know when that tipping point is so that they can change strategy accordingly. This is a really important idea. I hope you found this helpful. If you want more like this, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. There are a ton of mini episodes like this and full-length episodes in the podcast feed that are all completely free, plus a database of concepts just like this. And if you want to level up with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses, as well as being the place where you can get access to exclusive premium podcasts like Rob Bernacki's, Emily Kwok's, Joe Hannan's, and the like. So please do check all of that out. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's all at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks for hanging out with me and we'll talk to you in the next one.