It’s Not Me, It’s You

There is a sentence I said maybe fifteen times in Sunday’s class, until it stopped sounding like coaching and started sounding like a small philosophy: it’s not me — it’s you.

The setting is guard passing, and the sentence is literal before it is anything else. My partner is seated in front of me playing butterfly guard, and his job is to kick me away and recover. The conventional answer is to grab his ankles and lock everything down — body-lock passing, people call it — and when you do it, your whole upper body floods with the feeling of control. Arms engaged, grip complete, every muscle reporting the same confident news. And he can still kick you. He can wrestle up, he can spin to octopus guard, he can do more or less whatever he likes, because the grip was never what stopped him.

So we do the opposite. I point my knees inward — pinch them, inner thigh alive — and go light with my upper body. By every internal signal I am now doing less. My arms aren’t holding anything. And the kick is gone. Not resisted — gone, because a kick comes from the ankle and the ankle needs room, and my pinched knees have quietly deleted the room. When my partner strains and nothing happens and he looks up wondering why, the honest answer is: it isn’t me. I’m barely touching you. It’s that you no longer have the space to do the thing you’re trying to do. It’s not me. It’s you.

The control that announces itself is the weaker one

I keep returning to that line because it stops being about guard passing very quickly. The version of control that announces itself — that fills your arms and tires your grip and makes you feel strong — is usually the weaker one. It’s an isometric hold: exhausting, impressive from the inside, and beside the point. The quiet version doesn’t feel like anything. You’ve removed a possibility rather than fought it, and removal is silent. Most real control is like this. It looks like nothing is happening. That’s the tell.

The class built the whole pass out from that one idea, and every piece was the same idea again. The knee pinch handles his forward pressure. His backward escape — the shoulder walk — I handle by chasing with the beast walk, the ugly crawling drill we’d spent the warm-up on, which turned out not to be a warm-up at all but the technique itself wearing a disguise. His sideways turn I handle with my head: ear-to-ear, not chest-to-chest, because chest-to-chest tips me onto my skull into a tripod, and a tripod is a thing that gets lifted and kicked over. Ear-to-ear keeps me in a low beast structure that can’t be tipped. And nobody gives you ear-to-ear — you earn it, because your partner knows exactly what it costs him and fights to keep his head at your shoulder.

There’s a rhythm underneath all of it that I described as a Wing Chun idea: he comes in, I divert; he retreats, I follow; and the moment he commits to something and leaves a door open, that’s when I take my ground. Divert, follow, arrive. The arriving is the only aggressive part, and it’s the smallest part. Everything before it is just refusing to give him what he needs while I wait for him to hand me what I want.

A lesson about ambition

And then the last correction, which is really a lesson about ambition. When the pass finally works, where does it go? Not to mount. To half guard. You do not pass butterfly to mount — you pass butterfly to half guard, and then half guard becomes its own honest problem with its own posture and its own patience. People lose positions constantly because they are reaching three steps past the step they’re standing on. One guard at a time. One checkpoint, then the next.

Small structure, held lightly. Weight in the hip, never the hands — you can float your entire body off the floor as long as your hip stays heavy on his, because heaviness is a matter of where your weight points, not how hard you clench. Feel the stiffness before you see the kick. Earn the head position. Pass to the next room, not the last one.

It took ninety-three minutes to teach and I can say it in five words, which is the part that took seventeen years: it’s not me, it’s you.

— Professor Binish Sukhija