STOP Coaching to the Average

Averages are meaningless for coaching human athletes.

How often have you been told “this is the best way to do this technique, it works no matter who you are” and it just never worked for you as advertised?

I’ve been told this dozens of time. At this point, I ignore half of what any instructor says to me if it pertains to what jiu jitsu will empower me to do with “enough technique.”

It’s not arrogance. It’s just experience.

Instructors know everything about martial arts abstracts, but they don’t (seemingly) care to know much about the specific people who inhabit their mats.

Talk about the “perfect” or “best” technique, of course, implicitly assumes that everyone’s body is the same.

Some might retort that it’s based more on an average. But that’s even worse, because it’s a consideration that explicitly excludes your specific body.

Of course, we know everyone has different bodies. Long-legged players find triangles far easier than short-legged players, who have to engage in increasingly minute adjustments to even lock a triangle or finish it without exploding their knees.

Instructors will often justify their preferred set of special details about finishing a given submission hold by saying, “this is the version that works for everyone.” It works for the most people. In a sense, it’s an averaged technique.

There isn’t just this singular way to finish a triangle choke, though. You don’t have to cut a perfect angle and get all your ducks in a pristine row, provided your legs are long enough relative to your opponent. If they aren’t, then you have to scale to that situation. But if you’re unusually tall, it might never matter, even at higher levels of competition.

And you know what? Let’s get really spicy.

Why do you even need to master a leg triangle at all? It seems plenty of jiu jitsu players get along fine without it. Throughout Marcelo Garcia’s illustrious fight record, BJJ Heroes only records one win by triangle.

The point here is that technical averages sound enticing but they are meaningless. They don’t account for your body.

Every individual elite player in any sport moves differently than the other while solving the same problems.

There is no perfect technique.

There are no universally maximal details.

Coach to your mat. Coach to the individual.