Path of Least Resistance

Hands up those who have experienced peak hour traffic on their drive home.  The annoyance of seeing the other lane travelling way faster and thinking “Damn, I’m in the wrong lane”. Well  I’ve got my drive to and from work down to a fine art.  Through trial and error I know the quickest route home guaranteed.  I’ve got it down to an art that even includes which lane to be in when for which intersection to and from work. This might seem excessive, but different intersections have different blocking points for different lanes – I’m not talking swapping lanes every 300m, just a few times but that makes all the difference.  For one intersection it might be the left lane, for another the right lane.
A person who uses a GPS from my place to work would probably be 5-10 minutes slower than me purely because of poor lane selection.  So “mimicking” someone else's route in the hope of emulating them isn’t going to work without critical thinking and timing.
The same principle applies to BJJ.  Finding those paths of least resistance, and almost anticipating them before they happen takes a lot of time and attention to detail.  I’m slowly learning this,  unfortunately I’m still stuck in the “Oh crap, I should have gone into that lane”.
For me, one aspect is that of using my hips to do the work for me.  From day one I’ve had it spoken to death, but emulating everyone else I fell into similar traps.  While we all knew that, do you think we really did that in an active wrestle?  Take breaking open someone’s closed guard by using your hips and knee to force them open.  It works sometimes, but you get these strong persistent guys that just hold on for dear life. For me it turned into a battle of muscle.  Could I muscle their hips to the ground while pushing that knee down or could they slide up and just keep resisting.
Well a break through occurred last night, and that was try to break their guard using your hips and if that fails transitioning to the other side to repeat the same movement, the effect is cumulative in the space generated between your hips.  There are more subtle details but my partner (massively strong legs) just could not resist as more and more space is generated between our hips.  The advantage was it also took zero effort on my behalf.
As a matter of course now when I do “In-the-Hole” training, as soon as I meet resistance and I can’t progress I stop and ask to drill that exact move to find out how to progress without effort – which then increases both mine and my partners understanding of the mechanics.  In this case the path of least resistance needed good weight balance, hip movement and timing. I consider these nuggets of gold little wins for me that are slowly contributing to me re-building my game from the ground up (no pun intended) one pathway at a time. 
So keep  in mind next time you roll that if you’re using muscle, then you are practicing “Wrestling” and not Jiu-Jitsu.
Dan