What is the proper role of the imaginary in the instruction of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (or any martial art)?

Do techniques need speculative reasons for them to be comprehensible and justifiable? What is gained when an instructor says something like, “knee-on-belly is a great position because in case one of his buddies tries to step in, you’re upright and ready,” in order to validate the technique? Or can an instructor just demonstrate and say, “this is knee-on-belly, see how you can’t move,” and leave it at that? How do instructors modulate the imagination and balance the real with the growing Street Fighter Ryu in the student’s head?

I ask because I am now (and have been for a little over a year) in the privileged position of teaching a class once a week. Because of my judo background, I focus on judo throws followed by jiu-jitsu groundwork. Like many schools, teaching is part of the training towards the black belt. I’ve found this to be as rewarding as the teaching I do in my college courses. However, I’ve also found it to be strangely difficult in certain aspects.

The main difficulty is figuring out how much of the “phantasmatic” aspect to teaching particular techniques should be included. I haven’t figured out how to modulate that quite yet.

It’s no secret that the imaginary is integrated into our jiu-jitsu training. Even as we are practicing a technique, let’s say an arm-bar from mount, we are thinking of its instantiation on the streets in a self-defense situation. We go home and imagine the move and grapple with phantom attackers. The phantasmatic always hover, so to speak, above our training. I believe this is especially true of beginner jiu-jitsukas. A huge part of selling our art (in terms of signing up new students, not justifying it against other arts) is to narrate possible altercations and relay the (probably exaggerated) statistic that “99% of fights end up on the ground.” In other words, we invoke phantasms against whom the new student will learn to defeat.

My interest is in the teaching of the technique itself. Sometimes, I struggle as an instructor in relaying the technique and catch myself coming up with imaginary hypothetical encounters. Here I also speak of imagined jiu-jitsu rolls and not just dark-alley self-defense scenarios.

I ask myself, how do instructors do it? How do they know how far to let the imaginary go in teaching a technique? Or, on the other hand, do some instructors believe techniques do not need speculative reasoning for them to make sense? In one sense, there is always some sort of speculation because we are learning a technique in isolation, thus, we reason out the technique through speculation as to what occurred prior to that moment and where you want to end up afterward.

My own instructor, however, really limits the speculation. It really is technique only (to an extent). Part of the reason for the limit is that without it, speculative reasoning gives liberty to that student who says, “but what if the guy does this or that or this, etcetera etcetera.” I don’t think nothing exasperates an instructor as much as the flight of that type of imagination: they focus on the phantoms instead of the proper grip. So my instructor cuts it short. Yet, we can’t cut it short for all students. In fact, some need it.

At one end of the student spectrum, we have children. As an example, if we examine the Gracie Bullyproof instructional DVDs, we can conclude that their initial pedagogical approach is technique through the completely imaginary. It is pure play. It is the phantasmatic to the extreme because it is non-combative. The “Games” section introduces jiu-jitsu techniques and movements by willfully being silent of their jiu-jitsu application. The kids learn a technique without knowledge of its application. The game “Crazy Horse” asks the kid to take mami or daddy’s back and hold on. Pretend dad is a horse and the horse is trying to buck you off. The game “Spidey Kid” asks the kid to pretend they are a spider on top mount. The goal is to not let mami or daddy escape. The kids learn the technique but not it’s location within jiu-jitsu. Obviously, the lesson is that if you tried to teach the kids jiu-jitsu like regular adult jiu-jitsu classes, it would fail because you’d bore them into incomprehensibility.

The same, I believe, can be said of adults. We play, too, but our play is more analogous to the real experience it’s attempting to prepare us for. Instead of horse, we think jerk, bar drunk, or frat boy. However, must instructors narrate the imagined attacker for the technique to be remembered? Or is the narration in order to give the student a real-world analog to the time they are spending on the mat? I’d love to read a book on jiu-jitsu pedagogy. Most of us just have random YouTube videos where we get a glimpse of the pedagogy. The closest to the comprehensive pedagogy I have encountered is Robson Moura Requirements DVD. The last of five is titled “Strategies” and features Moura being interviewed. Questions like “What’s the best way to introduce BJJ to a new student?” are asked and answered. Unfortunately, the inquiry of this article is not one of those.

So, does teaching technique only limit jiu-jitsu’s selling point? Or is that question moot since 1993? What does non-figurative jiu-jitsu look like in its instruction? Is “literal” jiu-jitsu (that is pure technique only, leaving speculation for your fantasy role-playing video games) a thing that doesn’t even exist? Do techniques need speculative reasoning and phantoms for the majority of practitioners who don’t compete and will never find themselves in a self-defense situation? Is jiu-jitsu’s greatest selling point to these folks the boost in superpowers in their head? Is it okay if we have an image of Ryu or Chun Li hovering over us because, after all, jiu-jitsu does, in fact, work?