Without a fighter from Japan and a few Brazilian pioneers, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. Without a black belt from Vermont, I wouldn’t be competing at high-level tournaments. Without a select handful of dedicated people, I would be a completely different person than I am — a less happy, less tough person leading a less fulfilled life.
That last paragraph is about my lineage in jiujitsu, the teachers that have trained me. We think about that a fair bit in the martial arts.
Interestingly, a new guest article on JiuJitsu Times purports to not see why lineage matters. While I see where the author is coming from — yes, in a fight or a tournament match, no one cares who your instructor is — the piece wildly misanalyzes what lineage is and why it’s important. Continue reading “Why BJJ Lineage Matters”
My new technique video is out on the Roy Marsh JiujitsuYouTube channel. It’s my take on a fundamental, effective and powerful move: the tripod sweep.
I like to set this up from De La Riva guard, ideally with a cross-grip on the sleeve. But as I say in the video, we have a wide array of options to hit the sweep depending on what grips we get and how our opponent behaves. The little foot transition in the video is something I drill over and over.
Competition is valuable. The experience you get from standing across from another combat athlete who is going to try assiduously to choke you or bend your joints the wrong way is hard to replicate.
A tournament can either be a winning experience or a learning experience, or ideally both. Apart from the matches themselves, though, whether you have a good time at an event really depends heavily on how the tournament is run.
Since I starting training almost five years ago, I’ve been fortunate to compete at a ton of different events run by different organizations. During this time, I’ve developed some fairly firm thoughts on what makes a tournament a good experience for competitors — and by contrast, what undermines a competitor’s experience.
Yes, you want to win medals. But other things go into making a tournament a good experience!
My friend Roy Marsh asked me to come teach an open guard series at his school last week, and I stuck around to make a video for his YouTube channel. This simple De La Riva guard technique is my highest-percentage sweep when my opponent takes the combat base (one knee up) position, and I hope you dig it.
I had fun doing the video, and I know Roy’s going to be posting a bunch of great stuff from guys better than I am, so if you like this technique, please consider subscribing.
In life and in jiujitsu, we have different needs at different stages on the journey.
While I was in New York competing, I had the chance to spend a week training at Unity Jiujitsu. Part of this was to get ready for the tournament, since Unity has excellent tough, technical training. Another reason had a bit of a more long-term view to it.
I always try to take advantage of the chance to train when I travel, and I try to soak up as much as I can. if you learn the same technique from 10 different black belts, you’ll often learn 10 different techniques — all of them correct. Seeing how great practitioners do things, even if it doesn’t wind up being how you do things, can only help you.
The impetus for this post: I’ve taken private lessons from many outstanding instructors, and two of the best were from Unity instructorsMurilo Santana and Ana Lowry. What struck me about these two sessions, though, aside from how much I learned from each, was how very different their approaches were.
Awesome seminar with Murilo and Ana at Chapel Hill Gracie Jiuitsu. I am told the photographer was very handsome.
“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.” –Raymond Chandler
A new guard comes out every week. It’s remarkable how, after billions of years of evolution and thousands of years of human grappling, completely unforeseen positions somehow crop up every time there are DVDs to be sold.
It’s also interesting how, when a new guard is “created,” we’re treated to marketing efforts that inform us how innovative it is, how cutting edge, how devastatingly effective.
Hyperbole has its value, of course, as the Raymond Chandler quotation from above emphasizes. You’ve got to believe in what you do, and you have to market your instructional. Also, believe you me, I’m going to engage in a little hyperbole, right now.
Here it is: There is no such thing as spider guard.
Or worm guard. Or koala guard, or God help me mantis guard. There is no such thing as any of these.
This isn’t real, and if it were real, it would be called “Reverse De La Riva.”
There is only the guard. And the guard has principles. Every good and useful position within guard adheres to these principles.
Many times, fancy terminology for allegedly innovative positions disguises the fact that these “new” guards have been played for years — or worse, it distracts us from one fundamental concept of good guard play.
Now, obviously I don’t mean “the positions typically described as spider guard positions do not exist.” That’s where my own hyperbole comes in. I want you to consider the idea “there is no such thing as [insert name of guard position]” in terms of a thought experiment.
The positions exist. But when discussing the guard with new students, it’s more helpful to explain to them the concepts of what a good guard means rather than tell them “go straight to this specific guard position that you must use.” When we describe these positions, we should see this terminology as helpful visual shorthand and nothing more.
First, I’ll talk about why the last paragraph I wrote is true. Next, I’ll focus on why understanding the fundamental principles of guard is important. And finally, I’ll talk about what this idea means for those of us who train.
Why Is There No Such Thing As Spider Guard?
When we use the guard, whether in a sport environment or a self-defense situation, there are certain things we must do. Primarily, we must control distance.
If we don’t control distance, we aren’t safe, and if we aren’t safe, nothing else matters. There are a variety of ways we can do this, both in closed guard and open guard. But all of them require us to understand this: we are building structures. Our structures could be a solid closed guard. They could be feet on the hips in proper position. Could be a leg lasso, or any number of things.
The particular structure is less important than the idea that guard is a process of creating our own powerful structures while preventing our opponent’s structures from developing.
Better build a structure quick: that collar grip won’t get you anything. … OK, nothing will get you anything.
In order to build good structures, I have to control the inside space. If I grab my opponent’s arms on the outside of his triceps, he is in a more powerful spot than I am — not to mention that he can punch me. But if I use my hands to make hooks on the inside of his biceps, or if I grab his sleeves and step on his biceps, passing and punching becomes nigh impossible until he breaks my structures down.
“Wait!” You might be saying. “You just said ‘step on the biceps!’ You just said spider guard doesn’t exist, but you’re describing spider guard!”
This is exactly the point I’m trying to make. To achieve the goals of guard, I need to build structures. In order to do this, I need to step on targets. The most powerful targets are typically hips, biceps and shoulders. Why are these most powerful? Because they control the inside space.
Try passing a guard or punching someone without clearing their hands, feet or knees off your biceps. As long as you hit and maintain those targets, your structures are working. You can call that “spider guard,” for sure. But it’s more important, especially early on, to understand why the position we call spider guard works. And that there are other positions in the guard universe that serve the same function.
As Royce Gracie black belt Roy Marsh put it in a conversation with me, “guard is just structures that allow movement which can then build better or new structures.” This is a really important insight — that structures allow movement —for the next section.
Why Is Realizing “There Is No Such Thing As Spider Guard” Important?
Early on in my training, the De La Riva guard made sense to me. It just felt natural. I think certain positions like this pop up for all of us: there’s just this one thing that you gravitate to as a thing you understand and enjoy.
The biggest mistake I made in my early blue belt years: when I got in trouble, I held onto that De La Riva guard like a sinking ship. That changed when I took a private with Vicente Junior, an amazing black belt directly under Ricardo de la Riva.
He gave me an insight that is also reflected in the Roy Marsh dictum above: the guard is about movement and transition. When someone clears your De La Riva hook, you can fight like hell to get it back —or you can transition and step on a hip. When someone stuffs your foot between their legs, you can exhaust yourself trying to get whatever guard you want back — or you can move to Reverse De La Riva.
Jiu-jitsu is about efficiency, and fighting like crazy for specific positions isn’t efficient. If I’ve built a good structure, that structure will allow me to move.
This guy gets to call it “Spider Guard.” And watch him hit that target!
For me, realizing that I wasn’t a De La Riva Guard Player was a key insight. My DLR hook could become a hook elsewhere (inside the lead leg) or hit a target (a hip, a bicep). That way, I control distance. I maintain control of the inside space. I play guard, not “De La Riva guard” or “spider guard.”
I think if we teach new students these core principles as we teach them particular positions, it will be better for their long-term growth. Don’t just “play spider guard,” understand why spider guard works — and what stops it from working. That way if they clear your foot from a target, you aren’t exhausting yourself trying to do exactly that one thing — or worse, totally lost.
What Does All This Mean?
I want to say one other thing about fundamental principles, and then I’ll give the three things I hope you’ll take away from this post. All of these ideas apply to passing the guard too. It’s a game of structures, or building them and breaking them down.
If we have good fundamentals, we can prevent a lot of problem situations. Often, adhering to these core concepts can defeat the so-called “modern” open guard before they get started. One of the things Ze Grapplez did very well in our match this year, and a key reason he won, was that he prevented me from even getting my open guard going.
He did this with sound pressure passing that stopped me from — stop me if you’ve heard this — controlling distance and dominating the inside space. Once he achieved that, I was playing catch-up and I never caught up. If your opponent stops your offense before it gets started, it’s hard to win.
So, to sum up:
1. Fundamental principles are important, and by and large they don’t change: think of targets and hooks and structures, not ultra-specific positions.
2. Thinking of yourself as a Spider Guard Player or a De La Riva Guard Player or whatever it is can blind you to one of the most critical aspects of guard — the ability to move and transition.
3. Don’t always believe the hype about the hot new guard. Close your guard. If it opens, control distance, dominate the inside position, build good structures and keep yourself able to move. Whether you call that open guard, panda guard or Double Secret Probation guard doesn’t matter.
Actually, just call it Dirty White Belt guard. I could use the clicks. Happy training!
It’s tournament season, and with both the IBJJF New York Open and US Grappling’s Grapplemania in North Carolina just a few weeks away, I’m sure many of you will be competing — and some of you will be competing for the first time.
Since I did my first competition a little more than four years ago, I’ve learned a great deal. This includes a bunch of material I wish I’d known before my inaugural voyage into choking and being choked for medals. Hence, I wrote several posts designed to help my friends and the other students at the academy get ready.
We’re long overdue for lazy re-packaging of previous content some judicious aggregation and curation of past posts. Here are some of the posts that I think might be interesting if you’re relatively new to tournaments:
While reading a technique post on social media the other day, I thought of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. You know, as one does.
A very good black belt had posted a technique video with a helpful, fairly detailed explanation of the theory behind the move. Most of the commentary was positive, but one poster sneeringly suggested that the technique would only work in theory, and only against someone who didn’t know jiujitsu, which he called “jits.” He suggested an alternate technique, ending in what he called “kasa katami.”
It should go without saying to anyone who has browsed the jiujitsu corners of the Internet that this individual was a white belt.
Now, I’m not trying to pick on white belts in general here. Really. In fact, I’ll bet that every humble, dedicated white belt out there (and we have a lot of ’em) is making a facepalm pose. And yet, as the Bard put it, this type of shit happens every day.
Reacting to a black belt’s technique video in this manner is as silly as it is disrespectful — from any belt level — for two reasons. First, it assumes that you as the poster know more than the black belt does, which is a pretty bad bet.
Second, a strong statement reaction (“this wouldn’t work”) as opposed to an open question reaction (“I’m having a tough time visualizing how you’d use this. Can you explain why you’d do X instead of Y?”) cuts off access to information.
We’re all in this for different reasons, and so an instructor primarily concerned with self defense may be showing a move for purposes that wouldn’t make sense for competition, or vice versa. A black belt probably has a well-thought-out rationale for teaching something, but you won’t find out if you say something instead of asking something.
That, I hope, is apparent to most of us: respect the black belts. But there’s another element to this.
As someone gains knowledge in jiujitsu, that person feels more comfortable speaking up. Many of these folks want to teach, too, whether that means formally or just helping out less-experienced students in class.
Enthusiasm and passion should be encouraged, not squashed: I’d much rather have an enthusiastic person try to help someone out and make a mistake while doing so than have a selfish person never try. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach teaching and learning.
For guidance on the right and wrong ways, I naturally turned to an influential 14th century text.
***
If you don’t keep The Canterbury Tales beside your bed or commode for light reading, here’s a summary: a group of travelers becomes engaged in a storytelling contest, where the winner will receive a free meal. Along the way, we learn about the characters both from their descriptions and from the stories each of them chooses to tell.
It’s sort of like a medieval reality show, but with more believable characters and only one Kardashian (the Wife of Bath).
This line describing one of the characters, the Clerk, has always stuck with me. It was the inspiration for this post:
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech, And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.
The Clerk and his friend on their way to class.
The Clerk is a student of philosophy. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, his words are helpful and virtuous. He’s hard-working and devoted to reading and studying. He’s open-minded in terms of receiving knowledge, and humble about passing on the knowledge he has received.
Training with people like this is great. They share videos with you. They help you break down moves that you can’t yet hit, but don’t condescend to you about messing the moves up. And let’s not forget, philosophy is a part of jiujitsu).
This is the ideal approach, in my view. Gladly learn. Don’t necessarily say much (“he never spoke a word more than was need”), but make what you say count. Help others if you’re asked to. Gladly teach.
I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of black belts. Most of the best teachers are like this. Draw your own conclusions from that.
***
One reason the Canterbury Tales is significant in Western literature is that it popularized the use of the vernacular. And The Miller, in the vernacular, is a dick.
“I’m that dude who bought the fanciest gi I could find after one class. And this isn’t a musical instrument, it’s a visual representation of me sucking.”
The Miller is stout and strong. His physical prowess no doubt helped make him inconsiderate and a bully: he interrupts others, even going so far as to upset the host’s plans for the order in which tales are told. (He is — I pass this along without comment — noted as a wrestler in the text).
Oh, and when he tells his story, he does so in a way that denigrates several in the group, especially the nerds. Does this sound like anybody you’ve trained with? I hope not, but I’d bet so.
This is the not, in my view, a good representation of a martial artist. In fact, the Miller is the antithesis of a good training partner. When I think of him, I think of the big, strong guy who calls out the smallest person in the room, keylocks them and celebrates.
Then, when someone tries to correct his technique — to help him improve — he responds with a derisive “well, it worked, didn’t it?” As if that were the point.
There are lessons here for being a good training partner, for being an effective student, and more generally for being a pleasant human being to be around. Those lessons in two sentences:
Quiexinho is a rising star who beat Paulo Miyao last year, and he has a strong competition game. With everyone expecting another final between Cobrinha and Rafael Mendes, I said, Quiexinho could create problems if Cobrinha is just looking ahead to the final.
One of the best ever.
This assessment was wrong, and I should have known. Cobrinha isn’t just one of the best ever, he’s one of the most consistent elite jiujitsu players ever. Quiexinho has a bright future, but Cobrinha is still right there with Rafa Mendes as the featherweight top dog.
While I don’t think Cobrinha is underrated among people in the know, I think it’s worth reflecting on exactly how much this legend has accomplished in his tremendous career. We’re getting to watch one of the greatest of all time in the midst of an epic rivalry. Let’s step back and appreciate it.
Let’s start with the world championships. Only three men have won four or more featherweight Mundial gold medals: Cobrinha, the aforementioned Rafael Mendes, and another all-time great, Royler Gracie. Cobrinha has three nogi world championships as well.
He’s also an Abu Dhabi Champion, having beaten (you guessed it) Rafael Mendes in the 2013 final:
Those accolades alone would make him an all-time great. But consider how things might be different had Rafael Mendes never existed.
Consider that Cobrinha beats everybody other than Rafa — including accomplished competitors like Quiexinho — and beats them, in most cases, without a great deal of trouble. In a world without Rafael Mendes, there are six potential world championships on the table for Cobrinha.
In this alternate world, even if Tanquinho still wins in 2013 and another title slips away from Cobrinha somehow, we’re talking about eight world championships instead of four, and a reign of utter dominance from 2006 until now. (That number could be nine or even 10, but let’s be conservative). Keep in mind, too, that Cobrinha isn’t done by any means, and if there were no Rafa Mendes, he’d have breezed to another world championship last month.
In that world, this period of sustained dominance could have him in the conversation for greatest of all time, right up there with Roger Gracie and Marcelo Garcia . The alternative title for this post was, in fact, “A World Without Rafael Mendes,” but I thought that took the focus away from Cobrinha’s achievements.
Cobrinha also has an awesome dog, and is by all accounts a great guy.
We can take a pause here to consider what this says about the otherworldly skills of Rafael Mendes, but just for a moment. This post is about Cobrinha. Think about all that Cobrinha has achieved — and then think about how good a guy has to be to dothis to him.
You can’t talk about one of these men without talking about the other, though — the rivalry is that significant. Mendes acknowledged this in a Facebook post after his win, saying “because of Cobrinha I became probably ten times better than I would ever be if he was not there.”
Cobrinha will turn 36 in December. He’s still performing at an elite level, but time has a way of passing.
If he retired today, we’d still remember him as one of the greats. But Cobrinha is not retiring today, so let’s be sure to appreciate what we’re watching while we have the chance.
