Scaling walls, grappling people
My first Brazilian jiu-jitsu session was in 2013. I trained weekly for a while. Then I slacked off. I returned to once- or twice-weekly training in 2017 or 2018 whilst doing day and night shift work. I kept this up for a while, nabbing my blue belt. Then, in February 2020, I had a final session before the COVID19 pandemic hit and grappling with a decent number of people in a small space became a bad idea.
Sorely missing BJJ and at a loose end, movement-wise, I was prompted to try indoor climbing. This was the summer of 2021. I climbed once a week with a newfound friend for a while. Many of the aspects of BJJ that I fell in love with could, I realised, be found in climbing.
September 2023 comes around. The fog has cleared—pandemic constraints lessened, some life events behind me. Joyous, I began BJJ once more at a newly opened, local gym (whilst still climbing weekly). This time, I made a deliberate decision to sincerely engage with BJJ as a practice. Not so much to formulate a grand unified theory of the gentle art. Just to be more deliberate about my practice and my development.
It seems to have helped. In early December 2023, I became a purple belt. Personally, this is quite the milestone, and it has me thinking about both my practice of BJJ and my practice of movement in general. BJJ remains the focus, the priority. And I still intend to train my general movement prolifically. But I’m also keen to keep climbing once a week (even if I ratchet up my BJJ training frequency). And I’ve been wondering, where does that intent come from?
I think it’s because BJJ and climbing share many things. Practicing one enriches the other. I also think they are sufficiently distinct to provide different tracks of embodied novelty to explore. So below, I want to chart some of the former; the parallels that BJJ and climbing share, the way they enrich one another.
Disclaimer: any two sports (or movement disciplines) will have commonalities. The ones I describe below may not be unique to the BJJ-climbing coupling, but they seem, to me, to be particularly salient. And I’ll constrain myself to the classic working memory quantity—5 +/- 2—for brevity’s sake.
First up: grips.
Climbing refactor’s one’s perception. It makes you realise that the environment is rich with affordances to hold on to. And with affordances for grip, everything becomes scaleable. An example. I have never been a tree climber. I’ve always felt insecure, unsafe. Now, with a little climbing experience, scrambling a little ways up an inviting tree is easy. One’s environment, by becoming more graspable, elicits more interaction. This transfers to BJJ.
Climbing holds are notoriously sparse. And one uses both arms and legs to navigate between them. So when I returned to BJJ, not only did I have a disproportionately strengthened grip in comparison to my past self, I was also able to hold on to people with much more ease. I realised that the contours of someone’s body become much more graspable when one has some experience climbing. Cinching onto an arm, onto a shoulder, onto a leg, onto a torso, a head. Maintaining contact and managing the space during scrambles. Controlling someone’s energy, someone’s form, in both gi and no-gi. It’s similar to climbing, and much easier if one is used to climbing holds.
Second: shortest routes.
In a normative world, the shortest route between a sequence of points is a straight line. In physical disciplines like climbing and BJJ it is not.
In climbing, the journey from hold A to B to C to D is not a sequence of terse, jagged lines. It is more often a straight line, book-ended by tight curves and dense spirals at the hold points. In BJJ, the desired outcomes are to advance position or achieve a submission. Yet, each outcome must be arrived at obliquely. The reality of an attack or advance in one area is achieved via the spectre of an attack or advance in another. Want the arm? Threaten the neck.
For climbing and BJJ, the shortest route is surprisingly curvilinear.
Third: pushing and pulling.
One of the things I had to learn quickly whilst climbing is how one ascends a wall. One ascends by pushing with the legs rather than pulling with the arms. Within that sequence of pushing up the wall is a delicate balance of pushing and pulling. Of applying diverging pressures and tensions in a dynamic manner. Planting an arm whilst hooking with a toe. Maintaining stiffness across two contralateral limbs whilst being loose enough to turn one’s hips and reach an adjacent hold with a free leg.
BJJ has similar push-pull dynamics. Consider the objective of sweeping someone whilst in closed guard. You are on your back. Your opponent is wrapped in your legs and their centre of gravity is above you. You want to switch, to have your opponent on their back and be on your own feet free of their guard. This isn’t accomplished solely by pushing or pulling. It’s achieved by pushing and pulling. Simultaneously, you must bring their centre of gravity upwards and towards you, whilst introducing rotational force by pushing, for example, the left upper body away and the pulling the right upper body towards you.
It is the push and the pull, the harmonised application of complementary, divergent tensions, that makes the difference in both climbing and BJJ.
Fourth: natural movement helps.
Yes, this is perhaps a general truism for all embodied disciplines. But it’s particularly true for the timeless arts of climbing and grappling. Competence within the basic human movement patterns—squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, carrying—and conversational fluency with core motions—running, swimming, rolling, ground-based locomotion—act like a multiplier for climbing and BJJ.
See, climbing and BJJ each have points, little pools, of legibility. But surrounding those oases of order are fluid spaces, places where uncertainty and ambiguity reigns. And those pockets of illegibility are what makes the difference in performance. Capacities with natural movement make those fluid spaces simpler to navigate. Not easy, not simple. Just simpler.
Fifth: breath power.
As mentioned multiple times before, I’m an advocate of nasal breathing. It’s a veritable nervous system hack and mind-state regulator that is free for everyone.
I’d reaffirmed the power of slow, nasal breaths when I began climbing. In episodes when I was near to psyching myself out, the urge to slacken my jaw and speed up my breath became almost irresistible. When I resisted and controlled my breath, I regained composure and was able to execute. When I did not resist, my breath would be delivered via my mouth, my heart rate increased, my grip became slack, my muscles fatigued. I came off the wall.
Returning to BJJ, I was determined to utilise nasal breathing. From my first session, I have. And it’s been transformative. Working capacity for drilling and sparring is rarely diminished. But most of all, I’m calm, all the time. Slow breath; clear mind. This means that not only do I have a blanker canvas on which to explicitly consider situations. It also means that I operate implicitly, via intuition, on feel, with much more ease. I’m, by default, more relaxed.
Extra bonus of nasal breathing for BJJ? One is harder to choke or smother. A forearm across my mouth is not a hindrance. A semi-locked in triangle is easier to bear when the default is slower, measured respiration.
Lastly: not losing.
Unless one is competing, the practice of climbing and BJJ involves no loss. “Losses”—be it a failed move for a just-out-of-reach hold whilst climbing or a tap to a tight sub in BJJ—are unavoidable. They are part of the learning process. No-one gets a black belt without getting passed or getting tapped; no-one climbs an 8a without first being thwarted by a 6a+. Excepting competitions, there is no such thing as losing. Which means, happily enough, that one is always winning.