Learning jiujitsu is like learning a language. You don’t do it all at once. You learn the smallest, most base elements of a new tongue (an alphabet, words) before you dive in to the whole grand structure.

As you get more building blocks — more movements, a larger vocabulary of techniques — your understanding of the physical grammar expands. This is an exciting, albeit frustrating, process. If you want to become fluent, you have to acknowledge that what you’re aiming for is a long process.

That’s where transitions come in. Learning a technique well is powerful, but learning to flow between the techniques amplifies that power manifold. It’s the difference between knowing words and being able to have a conversation.

In this analogy, drilling complete transitions — chaining moves together — represents sentences and phrases, the core components of dialogue. When someone defends our attack, we want to be able to understand the language of that defense — and have our responsive phrase flow from us immediately and effortlessly.

Drilling helps us solidify our core of knowledge. Other people have knowledge, too, though. To stay ahead of them, we have to drill, and to drill chains of moves.