BJJ glossary: the words you will hear at the gym

In your first class you will understand maybe a third of the words. That is normal: BJJ grew up in Brazil out of Japanese roots and spread through English, so most techniques have two or three names. This list covers what you need in order to stop standing there wondering what everybody is talking about.

The everyday words

• Gi — the jiu-jitsu kimono: jacket, trousers, belt.
• No-gi — training without the kimono, in a fitted top and shorts.
• Rash guard — the tight technical top worn in no-gi.
• Tatami — the mat you train on. You step on barefoot, always.
• Rolling — sparring: you go for real, in rounds.
• Drilling — repeating a technique with a partner who is not resisting.
• Tap — hitting your partner with your hand to say “enough”. It is not a surrender: it is how you avoid getting hurt.
• Open mat — a free mat session with no teaching. We cover it here: Open mat.
• Oss — a Japanese-derived filler used at many Brazilian-lineage gyms as a greeting, an acknowledgement or a thank you. At others nobody says it at all.
• Professor — what the instructor is called at many academies in the Brazilian tradition.
• Lineage — the teaching line: who promoted your coach, and who promoted them.

The positions

BJJ thinks in positions, not in moves. Knowing what they are called is half the work.

• Guard — you are underneath, but you control your opponent with your legs. It is the position that makes jiu-jitsu different from any other form of grappling: being on the bottom does not mean losing.
• Closed guard — legs crossed behind your opponent's back.
• Open guard — legs uncrossed, in a thousand variations (de la Riva, spider, butterfly and so on).
• Half guard — you have one of your opponent's legs trapped between yours.
• Side control — you are on top, across your opponent's chest.
• Mount — you are on top, sitting astride their torso. A dominant position.
• Back control — you are behind them, with your heels hooked inside their hips. The strongest position in BJJ.
• Knee on belly — you are on top with one knee on your opponent's stomach.
• North-south — you are on top with your head towards their feet and vice versa.
• Turtle — the curled-up, all-fours position, typical of somebody who is defending.

The movements

• Takedown — the throw or trip that brings the fight to the ground.
• Guard pass — getting past the legs of somebody in guard in order to reach side control or mount.
• Sweep — reversing your opponent while you are underneath, swapping the positions around.
• Escape — getting out of a bad position.
• Scramble — that chaotic moment where neither of you controls anything and whoever gets there first wins.
• Shrimp (hip escape) — the hip movement used to create space. It is the first exercise you will learn, and you will keep doing it forever.
• Bridge (upa) — driving your hips up to roll off whoever is on top of you.

The submissions

These are the techniques that end the fight: joint locks and chokes. Your opponent taps, and you start again.

• Armbar (juji-gatame) — an elbow lock with your legs wrapped around the arm.
• Kimura — a shoulder lock using a figure-four grip on the wrist, rotating the arm backwards.
• Americana — a shoulder lock in the opposite direction to the kimura.
• Triangle — a choke with the legs, trapping the neck and one arm.
• Guillotine — a front choke with your forearm around the neck.
• Rear naked choke (mata leão) — a choke from behind that uses no kimono. The most common submission in BJJ.
• Cross collar choke — uses the lapel of the gi: it only exists with the kimono.
• Ezekiel — a choke that uses the sleeve of your own gi.
• Omoplata — a shoulder lock applied with the legs.
• Straight ankle lock — an ankle lock, and the first leg lock you will learn.
• Heel hook — a twisting knee lock applied through the heel. Dangerous, and banned in many divisions and rulesets: you learn it late and with an instructor who knows what they are doing.

Rank and belonging

• Belt — the practitioner's rank. The order and the timelines are explained here: BJJ belts explained.
• Degree (stripe) — the tape stripes on the belt, normally four per colour.
• Promotion — moving up a degree or a belt, decided by your own coach.
• Team / affiliation — the network of academies that share a method and a lineage (Alliance, Gracie Barra, Checkmat and many others).
• Academy — the individual gym. An academy belongs to a team, but not every academy is affiliated.

In competition

• Submission — ends the match immediately, whatever the score.
• Points — awarded for positions reached and held: guard pass, mount, back control, sweep, takedown, knee on belly. The exact values depend on the federation's ruleset.
• Advantage — half a moral point: awarded to whoever almost completed an action. It decides a huge number of matches that finish level.
• Absolute — the open division, with no weight limit.
• IBJJF — the most widespread international federation in gi jiu-jitsu.
• ADCC — the best-known international circuit for grappling without the kimono.

If you have not set foot in a gym yet, the right place to start is here: Your first BJJ class.