The Principles of BJJ - Part 5: Kuzushi

We honour BJJ's roots in Judo through this principle

In BJJ, kuzushi, a principle borrowed from Judo, plays a crucial role in setting up sweeps, takedowns, and submissions. Kuzushi, meaning "breaking balance" in Japanese, is the act of destabilising your opponent mentally through misdirection/feints or physically through disrupting their desired weight distribution (base) in order to make them vulnerable to your attacks.

Let’s dive into how kuzushi is used in BJJ, why it’s so important, and some practical examples to aid your understanding

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Why Is Kuzushi Important in BJJ?

1. Minimising Strength Disparity

   • Kuzushi and the principle of efficiency have some crossover. By disrupting balance, even smaller practitioners can neutralize larger opponents without relying on brute force.

2. BJJ is done against RESISTANCE

   • BJJ is done against live and dynamic resistance where an educated opponent knows what techniques you want to employ. Therefore, trying to directly perform a technique when an opponent is defensively sound will simply lead to failure. What we need is to firstly impart an off balancing effect onto our opponent to make them vulnerable to our desired attacks. This off balancing can take a physical form where we use our connections to our opponents to disrupt their base through pulling and pushing, or take a mental form where we use mind games an feints to bait an opponent into thinking we desire something else and in doing so capitalising on their reactions to perform our true attack.

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How Kuzushi Is Used in BJJ

1. Standing: Takedowns and Throws

   • Kuzushi is critical for setting up takedowns like the O Goshi (hip throw) where we need a pre-requisite of them leaning their weight forwards. A good way of achieving this desired effect is to start pushing into them. When they inevitably push back into us, they break their own balance for us allowing for an easy throw.

1. Guard Work: Sweeps

   • From the bottom, kuzushi allows you to perform sweeps by affecting their weight distribution directly. Generally speaking, for a sweeps to work, our opponent’s legs need to be light and their upper body needs to be close to ours to facilitate this.

     • The Scissor Sweep
       Before executing the sweep, you pull your opponent forward using grips on their collar and sleeve. This shifts their weight onto their hands, breaking their base and making it easier to topple them with your legs.

     • The Hip Bump Sweep
       An example of a sweep that does not adhere to this generalisation is the hip bump sweep from closed guard. To make this sweep work weight distribution wise, we need them to postured up (spine vertical). By firstly faking that we want to entangle their upper body and pull them into us, we encourage a reaction from our opponent to break and pull away from us. As they their upper body away from us, their spine goes from being bent to progressively vertical. This is what we need to perform the hip bump sweep with any success.