The Berimbolo Can't Save Your Jiu Jitsu

Words: Nic Gregoriades

A few years back I was in Tokyo filming a short documentary about what I believe is the true essence of BJJ. The script called for a few shots inside a traditional Japanese temple, and one of my hosts happened to know a jiu jitsu student who was a bona fide Zen monk. He offered me his temple for the day. In exchange, I offered him a complimentary private lesson.

He was a recently graduated blue belt who trained ten times a week — eight classes and two privates. After I answered a stack of his technical questions, we rolled so I could feel where he actually needed the work.

He came at me full speed with some genuinely flashy stuff: a wicked inverted guard, slick reverse De La Riva entries, the kind of game you'd expect from someone who spends his spare time on instructional apps. I hadn't seen most of what he was attacking with, so I waited for the openings, then used my size to pressure him into a few easy submissions.

Later that week I sparred a black belt at the same academy — same size, similar build, a near-identical technical game to the monk's. I expected another easy roll. Instead the match was brutally difficult and ended in a draw.

The difference between the two men was night and day. Pressure crumbled the first; the second was a fortress. Same attacks, wildly different outcomes. So what actually separated them, beyond the obvious gap in experience?

Fundamentals Come Before Flash

Most jiu jitsu players need to earn the right to use the flashy stuff. How can you expect to finish someone when you can't reliably pass to side control, or hold them there once you do?

Take red-and-white belt Mauricio Gomes. I doubt he could tell you what a worm guard or a matrix guard even is. But I've watched him roll with athletic 25-year-old blue belts throwing exactly those techniques at him, and he just... passes. Then chokes them with the same sequence almost every time. He can do that because his fundamentals are bulletproof.

Defence Wins Rolls

The blue belt could attack, but on defence he was easy to control and finish. The black belt was the opposite — any control I managed to get, I had to fight to keep. He simply knew his escapes and his frames far better.

That's closely tied to fundamentals, since defensive concepts in Jiu Jitsu are almost always the fundamental ones.

You've probably heard "attack is the best form of defence." It doesn't hold up on the mats. Attacking gives your opponent space, and space is exactly what flips you from offence to defence. Good defence, on the other hand, tires your opponent out, frustrates them, and hands you attacking opportunities of your own.

Breathing Is a Skill, Not an Afterthought

After five minutes, the blue belt's chest was heaving and he was gasping. The black belt was sweating but composed — barely breaking rhythm. Controlling your breath is essential to good BJJ, and it still astounds me how few people train it deliberately. Maybe most understand it and just ignore it anyway.

Breathing patterns in jiu jitsu are a big topic on their own, but the basics are simple: keep your breathing even and rhythmic, breathe through your nose where you can, and use your opponent's breath to pace your own — make sure yours is always the slower one. Never hold your breath.

Attributes Still Matter

I outweighed the black belt by over 30 pounds, and it didn't matter — his strength-to-weight ratio was good enough that I couldn't out-muscle him. Strength plays a real role in jiu jitsu; the more of it you have relative to your weight, the better off you are. If you keep getting thrown around, hit the weight room, or get on a climbing wall. Ideally both.

Both men were similarly flexible, but the black belt's other attributes were sharper across the board — better balance, more endurance. Interestingly, it was the monk's flexibility that kept him competitive at all. Bring his other attributes up to that level and he'd have been a lot closer to the black belt.

Timing Beats Technique Count

The blue belt's attacks never felt dangerous. Whatever the black belt threw at me forced a real defensive response and broke my rhythm. That gap is timing, plain and simple.

Timing comes from repetition. The blue belt would be far better served picking one of his flashy sweeps and drilling it into the ground, instead of learning ten of them half-heartedly. Watching how the black belt trained later confirmed it — heavy drilling, very specific sparring, nothing scattered.

Build Your BJJ on Rock, Not Sand

Don't build your jiu jitsu foundation on technique alone, and especially not on the overly complex, esoteric stuff. There's an old parable about building your house on rock instead of sand — it applies here directly.

Build your game around a rotating cast of flashy moves and you're building on sand, because that layer of the sport never stops shifting. Techniques get replaced by sharper ones, fall out of fashion, or get legislated out by a ruleset change. The core principles and core movements never do. Focus there and you're building on rock.

The berimbolo can't save you. Neither can the tornado guard, the worm guard, or whatever inverted-reverse-dimension-X move is trending on your feed this month. No technique can. Mikey Musumeci, Gordon Ryan, the Ruotolo brothers — every one of the athletes making the highlight reels right now built their flash on top of fundamentals so solid you'd barely notice them underneath. That's the part worth stealing.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 4 April 2017. Refreshed for 2026.