As a five-day countdown to our hundredth show, we’re going to be posting two blog items a day until Friday, culminating in two big giveaways, one big announcement, and finally our 100th show. Stick around for the top two announcements for sure — I think you’ll be as excited as we are.
TODAY: Five Great Pieces of Advice From Show Guests
We try to get the best jiujitsu minds we can on the show. If you love jiujitsu, you want to get better at it — and the following five people delivered some advice that we think will help. Lots of other great advice in the other 95 interviews, too!
ON WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD SEEK DURING TRAINING
“What people should seek is not necessarily becoming better, but understanding — an overall understanding of the objectives of the game. To become able to flow more over time, to use a lot less energy, and to risk a lot less of your life — your bones, your joints, all these things, these injuries that will always occur with jiujitsu. Understanding how to not get hurt when you’re training.” — Andrew Smith
ON BEING OPEN-MINDED AND INCORPORATING ALL THE FIGHTING ARTS
“As I learned to love each individual art, it gave me a full appreciation for the variety of techniques, and the depth to which you can take each technique in each art, and then how much fun it is to combine all that and to make it into one big picture, and to put it all together, and to be completely open to adding anything to your game that works. And to be willing to exclude something that works for someone else just because you find, on your path, that it’s not going to be effective for you. To me, being a fighter is being open to whatever is going to work in that timeset.” — Cody Maltais
ON EGO, PRIDE AND TRAINING
“I told Lucas [Lepri] ‘yeah, we leave the ego at the door.’ And he said something that stayed with me. He said: “No, man, it’s OK to have ego. It’s normal. Just have it in check.’ To say that it didn’t bother you that you did bad today — c’mon. To say that you’re OK with losing — nobody is OK with losing, even if they say they are. It’s OK to have ego, it’s OK to have pride. Just don’t let it be this vice that overcomes you.” — Tony Casarez
ON COMPETITION AND FEAR
“Competition, for me, was another tool for me to use in the jiujitsu context. I focused on this concept in jiujitsu, but I use it in the rest of my life as well: If I’m afraid of something, then I have to make myself do it. Once I discovered that I was afraid of competing, I knew I had to figure out how to do it. So competition gave me that. … The skill building and the preparation for competition are really important for character building, for gut checks, and they change the nature of your training and the energy of that training.” — Valerie Worthington
ON THE BIGGEST MISTAKE BEGINNERS MAKE
“When you’re a white belt in jiujitsu, your job is to show up to class, do whatever your instructor tells you, and that’s it. And hopefully you have an instructor who has a fundamentals class and covers actual fundamentals in the fundamentals class. That’s the biggest mistake I see beginners making: trying to do too much, all at once. The berimbolo will still be there in three or four years when you have enough solid basics to actually understand the mechanics of the movement.” — Jake Whitfield