A new student is caught under someone far better than they are, and they know it.
As a Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and a coach, I watch this from the side of the mat almost every single session.
The new student does what their body tells them. They thrash. They throw their weight around and try to force a way out of a position built to stop exactly that. They can only see what’s in front of them, which is the same trap the generals in the Ardennes fell into. What’s in front of them is a problem, so they throw everything at it.
Soon they’ve burned most of what they had.
Put a student with a year of experience in the same spot, and I see something different. They wait. They let their opponent move, and they wait for a mistake. They still get caught sometimes, and when they do, they still wait for an opening.
What does the experienced student know that the new one doesn’t? To submit you (force you to tap out), your opponent has to reach a superior position. Without a good position, they can’t control you, and without control, they can’t submit you.
Until that chain finishes, a bad spot is only uncomfortable. The opening comes mid-transition, when the opponent isn’t fully in control. That’s when the experienced student goes.
To an outsider, both of them look like they’re reacting. One is hyperactive. The other is timing it.
Writer Rolf Dobelli calls the first kind “action bias.” When a situation is new or unclear, we’d rather do something than sit in the not-knowing. Even doctors who can’t yet diagnose a patient tend to intervene rather than wait.
John Boyd, the fighter pilot who developed the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act), argued that the fastest decision-makers skip deciding altogether. They act from a feel built over years. He borrowed a German word for it, Fingerspitzengefühl, fingertip feel.
Waiting has an end, though. You can’t sit there hoping for a last-minute escape. The window is real, and it closes.
Ask an experienced student how they spot the opening, and they’ll usually say they just feel it and move. Some of it can be systematized (plenty of Jiu-Jitsu is), but every system bends around whoever’s using it.
From across the room, waiting looks like doing nothing. From where I stand, it’s the hardest work on the mat.