The Limb Isolation Principle

In grappling, you only become dangerous to your opponent when you take his back or isolate a limb (or, best of all, both)

The concept of limb isolation is central to Jiu Jitsu as it is what allows a smaller person to attack a bigger person. A bigger person may have a stronger arm or leg than a smaller person, but the entire body of the smaller person is invariably going to be stronger than a single limb of the bigger person.

There are multiple ways to isolate limbs. It is systematic work that has to be done with extreme caution, given an equal level opponent will know that your main goal is for submission, and you will spend considerable energy or KI to do that. Indeed, that is when your opponent must try to off-balance you, in order to avoid limb separation and possibly recover positional advantage, or at least not fall deeper into the pit you are digging for him.

It is important to notice that you don’t necessarily need to isolate the limb you will attack but could isolate the opposite one first.

The most common attack resulting from limb isolation is the arm bar – a submission hold used to force the opponent to quit (tap out), thus ending a match in either Jiu Jitsu, Judo or MMA. It works by hyperextending the elbow joint. In the picture below you can see me winning a competition in 2018 with an arm bar.

The same thing can be done with legs, but I will come back to those attacks later. The interesting thing to notice is that some fighting situations, despite being dangerous, result in self-limb isolation, such as when someone attacks you with a sword, knife, stick etc.

Limb separation in life and business is about creating a situation where we isolate situations to our advantage, minimising the strength of our opponent, or the opposing forces, by keeping them apart and inefficient.

Practical application:?

When I was working as CEO for COMAU Russia, we were competing for a €120 million body welding project for Autovaz, the maker of the famous Lada brand. Our main competitor was a Chinese company. Their strength was of course mainly on the price side. My strategy, given we did not want, nor were able, to compete on price, was to open a local office in Togliatti and immediately start developing local mechatronics. This allowed me to separate the service “limb” of the Chinese, given our response time was much faster, local, and continuous.?

How can you isolate the limbs of your competitors in order to render them weaker? What kind of investment does that require?