Beauty

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Beauty is rarely mentioned in BJJ, but I believe it’s one of the topics you could reflect on and explore in your BJJ journey.

That’s how I feel anyway.

I want to be able to grapple in a beautiful way, though the concept of beauty in the context of BJJ is rather hard to define. So, in reality, I bring up beauty in BJJ, but I only have some vague ideas about it.

When moves/techniques are executed at the right timing as if the opponent is not resisting at all, I’d say these moves/techniques are beautiful.

But this is only a rough definition, and perhaps it doesn’t capture beauty in BJJ completely.

Having said that, I think it’s better to have a working definition and keep refining it till it becomes something more promising.

In a way, it’s also an ideal you could aim for. You may never reach this ideal, but you can keep moving towards it… It can also serve you as an eternal carrot dangling in front of your BJJ donkey mind (if you are motivated by beauty at all).

This quest for beautiful jiu jitsu will inspire you to keep training.

p.s. Not an example from BJJ, but I’d say Kosei Inoue’s uchimata is some of the most beautifully executed techniques in martial arts, for example.