Glossary

You are on your back or seated, using your legs between you and the other person. Sounds bad, is actually a fighting position with attacks. Comes in flavors: closed, open, half.

Sitting on someone's torso. If you are on top, good. If you are under it, you are working on the worst real estate in the sport.

Chest-to-chest at a right angle, legs free. Heavy.

Behind someone with your legs hooked in. The best position in jiu-jitsu. Their best position when it happens to you is called learning.

From guard, flipping the person on top so you end up on top.

Getting around someone's legs (their guard) to a dominant position.

A choke or joint lock that ends the round when the other person taps. Subs, for short.

Patting your partner or the mat (twice, clearly) to say stop, you got me. Verbal "tap" counts. It resets the round, not your dignity.

Sparring. Free practice against resistance, usually five or six minute rounds.

Repeating a technique on a cooperative partner. Most of class.

The hip-escape movement from the warm-up. You move along the mat like a shrimp. It is the most used movement in the art and the reason warm-ups exist.

Breaking balance before a technique. The reason your sweeps fail.

An all-purpose grunt of acknowledgment borrowed from Japanese martial culture. Means yes, hello, understood, respect, depending on context. Use sparingly until you absorb your gym's dialect.

From 道着 (dōgi), the cotton jacket-and-pants uniform. No-gi is the same art without it.

Start with whichever one your gym actually teaches at times you can attend. The honest version of the gi versus no-gi answer, tribalism removed.

Sparring. Free practice against resistance, usually five or six minute rounds.

From back control, arms around the neck, no gi required, hence "naked." The sport's most famous ending and the reason back control is the best position in jiu-jitsu.

The gi's own lapels, crossed at your neck and used against you. Being submitted by your own clothing is a rite of passage; my first one is documented in the progress post, both occurrences.

The front headlock choke. Famous for catching people who dive at legs with their chin up, which is why coaches keep saying chin down.

A choke made of someone's legs, locked around your neck and one of your own arms. Geometry as a weapon; the name describes the shape your predicament makes.

A collar choke from the back where the finisher ends up shaped like an archer. Among the strongest chokes in the gi, and weirdly elegant to watch from the wall.

Their two legs and whole body against your one elbow, levered straight. Arrives slowly enough to tap to, which is the entire system working as designed.

A shoulder lock with the wrist held in a figure-four grip, named after the judoka Masahiko Kimura, who used it to beat Hélio Gracie in 1951. You will hear this name more than any other on this list.

The kimura's mirror image, attacking the shoulder the other direction, usually from on top. Also called the keylock.

A shoulder lock applied with the legs, from guard. The name is Portuguese for shoulder blade, and the position looks impossible the first dozen times you see it.

The one leg attack most gyms allow early.

The one most gyms forbid until upper belt, because it attacks the knee with very little warning between tight and injured. Gym rules about leg locks vary more than rules about anything else: learn yours in week one, the etiquette post's quiet-rules lesson in its sharpest form.

From back control, arms around the neck, no gi required, hence "naked." The sport's most famous ending and the reason back control is the best position in jiu-jitsu.

Base in BJJ is the connection to the ground that lets you absorb force without falling over. You notice it like electricity, only when it goes out.

A frame in BJJ is a bone placed where muscle would fail: structure that holds weight you could never lift. Why the skeleton outlasts the biceps.

Pulling guard means choosing the bottom on purpose: trading the takedown battle for a fight you have prepared. Why it exists and why it confuses everyone.

Open mat is unstructured training time. No instruction, just rounds and whoever showed up. What it is for, and how a beginner uses one without wasting it.

Most BJJ gyms welcome traveling visitors who email first, bring a clean white gi, and roll politely. The drop-in ritual, learned by doing it wrong once.

A first stripe in BJJ usually arrives somewhere between two and six months, and it does not mean you are good. What the tape on the belt actually measures.

You are not out of shape, or not only. Beginners gas out because panic burns oxygen and inefficiency burns everything else. Both improve faster than cardio.

BJJ rounds start from the knees to fit more pairs on the mat safely, because takedowns are the riskiest thing in the room. What that choice costs and buys.

Jiu-jitsu means the gentle art because 柔 (jū) names a method, yielding to force instead of meeting it, not a temperament. The mat explains the word eventually.

The standard way to tie a BJJ belt, step by step in plain words, why it unties itself mid-roll, and why nobody minds.

Getting handled by upper belts is not evidence you are failing. It is the curriculum working. What those rounds are for, and how to stop dreading them.

Shoes off the mat, clean gi, short nails, ask before you roll, and let the higher belt set the pace. The etiquette nobody posts on the wall.