The more time I spend in jiujitsu, the more I think about how best to create a school culture. I’ve been lucky to learn from a lot of amazing people, and while each gym is different, the best ones have a set of core values — often implicit. I wanted to make those values explicit, so I came up with this.
What do you think? What’s missing?
We Believe
We believe that jiujitsu is for everyone. Not everyone has the same goals or the same ceiling, but everyone can improve their life by training.
We believe in constant improvement. Everyone in your life knows something that you don’t. Every person on the mat can help you get better at something.
We believe in being good training partners. Your training partner is the most important person in the gym. Train so both people get something out of the class.
We believe in training hard and training smart. If we never spar hard, we don’t get all the benefits jiujitsu offers as an “alive” martial art. If we treat every sparring round like the finals at the world championships, we sacrifice technical understanding and risk injury. Train hard. Train smart.
We believe in jiujitsu for self defense, jiujitsu for sport, and jiujitsu for life. This art will help you reach your goals — and if you pay attention to the fundamentals, you can succeed in all the areas of jiujitsu.
We believe that jiujitsu is for everyone. This is important, so we’re saying it again. Everyone is welcome here.
Your job at white and blue belt is to learn, reinforce and try to master the fundamentals. Every gym defines what those fundamentals are slightly differently, but however your gym’s fundamentals curriculum is structured, your time at white and blue belt has to end with you knowing it inside and out.
In August, I wrote about how to make an improvement plan while you’re a white or blue belt. A lot of the off-the-mat tactics for improvement — visualization, yoga, meditation — remain the same, and are never going to be bad for you. Those practices are all things I still do as often as I can. As you advance in the belt ranks, though, you can expand your knowledge and skillset — both because you’re going to be able to assimilate more information, and because more techniques become legal in competition.
This doesn’t mean you abandon the basics. Quite the opposite. Refining my understanding of the fundamentals is something I expect to do for the rest of my life. Yet as your knowledge expands, the more you realize how much there is to know.
That’s why structuring your training becomes more important at high blue belt, purple belt and thereabouts. It’s the most efficient way to know what you know, and conversely what you don’t know. Evaluating your knowledge base helps determine your drilling and learning priorities. Of course you should keep coming to class, including the fundamentals class. Extra drilling and focused training during rolling are great ways to get faster, better results in addition to class.
Planning for the worst-case scenarios is the best way to ensure those scenarios don’t happen.
When you’re dealing with something as complex as jiujitsu, the possibilities for what might happen in a given sparring session or competition are almost literally limitless. Preparing as best we can, physically and mentally, is the best way to be prepared. How do we prepare to succeed, though, when the material we need to know is so vast?
The answers slightly vary based on experience level and belt level — and vary greatly from person to person, because we all have individualized needs — but I’m going to give you my best general answers for how to make a three-month plan dedicated to improving your jiujitsu. These would vary based on people’s goals, of course, and particular needs. A young woman focused intently on winning competition jiujitsu matches would have different needs from an older man focused on weight loss and self defense, for example.
Having a plan doesn’t guarantee that you’ll hit your goal, but it’s the best way I know for structured improvement. Plus, if you miss your goal, you’ll know you did everything you could to get there, which is some solace.
Originally, this post was going to be how to make a training plan at every belt level. It got very long very fast, though, so I’m splitting it in two. This post will cover how to make a training plan for white and early blue belts. If you’re a mid-level blue belt and up (say, you’ve been a blue belt more than two years, or have two stripes or more), a post is coming for you soon (EDIT: that post is here).
And here’s an idea — what if, instead of just offering private lessons, gym owners offered personalized training plan packages for one, three, or six months that included tailored improvement plans for that specific student? Just a thought for you gym owners. Continue reading “Making a Training Plan For Jiujitsu at White and Blue Belt”
Mat time is the best time. You should — and almost always will — feel better about everything after a solid night of training. In order to get the most out of mat time, it helps to think about your approach.
One of the rarest but smartest questions I get from newer people is, phrased one way or another, “How do I roll?” Sometimes people are looking for a technique to start a sparring session with, just to get the game going. Sometimes people don’t want to be jerk people complain about having to roll with. Often, people want to know how to maximize the value they get from rolling sessions.
All of these are great reasons, and they hint at an important meta-principle about jiujitsu: don’t be afraid to ask questions! People want to help you progress. Besides, we’ve all seen problems created when someone erroneously assumes they know the rolling culture of their gym without having to ask.
Here are five principles that should help, especially for newer people.
Over the years, I’ve cornered a lot of my friends and training partners in hundreds of jiujitsu matches. Everyone’s style of doing this is slightly different, and I think establishing clear expectations for what’s about to happen is useful. Now that we have a crop of new white belts about to embark on their competition journey for the first time, I thought I’d aggregate the spiel I usually give into one post. I haven’t given all this as one speech before, but all of this is advance advice I have actually given competitors before coaching them. Good luck to everyone competing at US Grappling Charlotte, and if you’re competing for Triangle Jiu-Jitsu, give this a read before you find yourself with me in your corner.
You’re about to have an exceptional experience. 99.9 percent of the human population will never do this, and it’s going to be exhilarating. You should be proud of yourself for signing up and whatever happens out there, you’ll be better because you did.
This is your experience. What you do in this match will be your achievement. I’m just here to help. We always want to win. And I want my coaching to help, not hurt, so here are the things you need to know.
I’m going to be giving you information and advice throughout the match. For one thing, I’ll be keeping track of the time and points for you, so you don’t have to. This will help you make strategic decisions about what you do. These will be the cold, hard facts: neither of us can change the fact that there are 90 seconds left, or that we’re up 2 points and down an advantage.
Most of my advice will be in terms of options. Ideally, I know your complement of techniques pretty well. If you come to my classes or we train together, I should have a good idea of the moves you’re best at. I want to encourage you to do those moves, to point out opportunities you might miss, or to just give you a few options about how to proceed (i.e., “We can pull guard here if we want, but if you want to shoot, the single leg is there”). This helps you know that there’s more than one door in front of you, and ideally it also avoids telling your opponent what you’re going to do (“she’s gonna pull guard!”). At times if I see you setting something up, I’ll say “I like it!” for exactly the same reasons.
Coaching is important! Andrey Alexandrov gets some high-quality technical instruction here from his coach, Seth Shamp.
My main goal will be to get you to safe spots, hubs where you can control your opponent and decide what the best plan of attack is. If I see the chance to get us to one of those spots, I will advise you to get your grips and settle there.
If I don’t know your game well and you ask me to coach you, I’m happy to, but let’s have realistic expectations of each other. I will still give you the best possible information I can — maybe I can see that your opponent is opening her guard when you can’t see it, and I want to let you know that — but in terms of tactical advice, I may just tell you what I would do there. This may or may not be what you should do there, because our jiujitsu may be different. Therefore:
I won’t be offended if you ignore my technical suggestions. It’s you out there, not me. Maybe you see or feel something in the moment that means you shouldn’t do what I want you to do — like maybe your base is compromised, and if you try to pass the way I want you to, you know you’ll get swept. Or maybe you’d like to do what I want you to do, but you don’t know the move well enough to execute it with confidence. Maybe you just get tunnel vision. That’s fine: we’ll debrief after the match about what you chose to do and why, and what we need to work on for next time (including, maybe, our communication!). Don’t think I’m going to be frustrated with you if you don’t do exactly what I say: I will trust that you are trying, and please trust that I am trying to give you the best advice I can, too.
Sometimes, I will shout firm and definitive advice. This means I am 100 percent certain that this is what you should do, so please try to do it. If you can’t do it, because you don’t understand or because you can’t execute it for whatever reason, I won’t be upset with you, but if you hear me yelling something like “we’ve got to put our knee in the middle next time so he doesn’t re-close the guard” or “you need to let go of that grip and shrimp away, right now,” I strongly encourage you to try to do it.
I probably won’t yell. It’s not really my style, and I think it’s usually counterproductive. I want you to do the best possible jiujitsu move, which means I want you to be cerebral and technical. If you’re a beast that can jump out of the gym and always outlast your opponent with cardio, awesome: feel free to do that, and you probably don’t need my counsel anyway.
Don’t forget to have fun out there, killer. We want to win. We always want to win: it’s the objective, and it’s always more enjoyable than losing. But you get to do jiujitsu today, and your body is healthy enough for you to go out and have an experience that almost nobody else gets to in this life. There’s nothing better than a day doing this, and you have that chance today. What’s better than that?
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. I still remember the first time I hit the basic rear naked choke, and I also remember the months it took me to get there.
But you can’t say the same words forever unless you’re Hodor. You also can’t rear naked choke everyone either. 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.
We’ve talked about the power of drilling before. It 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. I had a great response to my earlier post about how I drill and learn moves, so I thought it might be helpful to do a follow-up on my method for drilling transitions.
I divide the types of chain drills I do into two categories in my mind: static (or simple) and dynamic (or active). These aren’t cut-and-dried distinctions, but it’s how I think about them. We’ll start with the most simplistic versions of these and advance to the most complex.
As my future father-in-law says: you pay for everything with either money or time, and sometimes both. Ideally, you should maximize your return on all investments.
If you go to class three times a week, you’re probably spending at least 7 hours of your life (and your monthly gym dues) trying to learn jiujitsu. Maybe you’ve had the experience of learning a move, being interested in it, playing around with it … and then two months later, you have no clue what happened, and six months later when your instructor shows you the move again you slap your forehead because you forgot you’d even seen it.
Or take going to a jiujitsu seminar, for another example. If you spend $65 and two or three hours of your life to learn from Dave Camarillo, for example, you probably learned a lot. You’ve invested time and money. What if someone told you just a little more effort could cement that knowledge in your mind, expanding your repertoire over the long term?
Drilling is central to success in jiujitsu. With an art this detailed, you simply have to repeat the core movements thousands of times to train your body. As Roger Gracie famously advised, you shouldn’t drill a move until you get it right — you should drill until you can’t get it wrong.
That’s not the point of this post, though. It’s very common that I see new white belts making mistakes in terms of drilling method: either they treat it like sparring, or they race through the details, or they make other simple errors that are going to impede the learning process.
These are understandable mistakes — they’re new, for one thing. Also, sometimes new people see upper belts doing drills that are more appropriate for experienced people. Drilling should never stop. Red belt legends still drill basic moves.
It’s a lot easier to implement good practices than to correct errors. So let’s go over how I like to drill myself, and how I suggest you learn jiujitsu through drilling as you move up through the ranks. Continue reading “How to Drill for BJJ”
You’d think grip fighting would rank at the top of the “grappling fundamentals” list. When you grapple with someone, you have to grab them, and if they’re wearing clothes, those clothes are an ideal target for said grabbing.
Yet when I started jiu-jitsu, I remember my knowledge of grips lagging behind. I don’t want this to happen to you, and so although I’m hardly an expert on grip fighting, I’m going to list some of the principles I wish I’d known all along.
Because grip-fighting is its own universe, we have to narrow it down: this post will focus on grip strategy for when you’re on your back in guard, although a lot of the principles apply everywhere else in a fight or grappling match. Let’s talk about two crucial overarching principles first.
Control Inside Space: We’re more powerful when our arms are pulled in close to our bodies. This makes it easier to push and pull an opponent, harder for them to push and pull us, and creates a barrier to them striking us. This is why pummeling is so important in nogi situations and MMA — and the principle holds true when wearing the gi as well.
For a simple example, from your closed guard, try grabbing the outside of your opponent’s sleeves. Not only would your opponent be able to punch you pretty easily, you’re less able to control their arm movements. Now, pummel inside and put your hands on their biceps. The situation changes. I’m not suggesting the hand-on-bicep play as a preferred position: just trying to illustrate that if your opponent’s grip-fighting has allowed them to successfully control inside space, you need to address that.
Deny Their Grips First: An ounce of prevention is worth a 16 ounce can of whoop ass. I think Confucius said that, or Stone Cold Steve Austin. Whichever. If your opponent can’t effectively grab you, they can’t effectively grapple you.
Judo players are some of the best at this. I’ve watched Olympian and world champion Jimmy Pedro’s Grip Like a World Champion DVD several times, and I still feel like an high school student auditing a Ph.D class when I do. Pedro illustrates both of these principles in this short spot:
This second principle might seem self-explanatory, but its importance can’t be overstated. If they don’t get the grips they want, their game never gets going. As Jimmy Pedro says in the video, the more skilled person is always going to win given equal mastery of grips. But if you get into a situation where your grip is much more advantageous, you can win exchanges with opponents who are more skilled than you are. That’s powerful.
If we initiate our ideal grips, we can do double-duty: if I control the sleeve well, getting a deep grip and putting my knuckles on the back of my partner’s wrist, I can both get good control and prevent my partner from re-gripping.
Now let’s get into what grips you want. The attacks you prefer inform the grips you want, and vice versa. Let’s talk first about what we can do with grips when we’re in the guard.
Note: there are endless possibilities (and you’re welcome to share your favorites in the comments), but these are some solid fundamental grip options to begin playing with.
When We’re In Closed Guard, or They Pass From the Knees
Collar and sleeve: We reach for the cross-collar grip (deeper the better) with one hand. For example, my right hand would reach deep in my opponent’s right-side lapel. Then, my free (left) hand grips my partner’s same/mirror side, in this case his right hand.
This allows us some control of our opponent’s posture, since we can use the collar grip to prevent them from posturing up, and accesses powerful fundamental attacks like the cross-collar choke and the scissor sweep. Because we have control of one sleeve, our opponent can’t post that way, and so if we off-balance them in that direction, they risk losing top position.
Cross-grip on the sleeve: This powerful grip is the counter-point to the mirror grip. If I can grab my opponent’s right sleeve with my right hand, for example, I can turn that opponent’s body at angle that allows me to expose their back. If we get a good grip here, we can put constant pressure of a back attack on our opponent — which also sets up fundamental sweep options like the pendulum sweep, taking us to mount instead of the back.
I will often set up the cross-grip off of a grip break. Check out the Vicente Junior video below for good grip break tips.
When They Stand To Pass Our Open Guard
If they’ve opened our guard and stood up, they have more mobility — but they also have a less stable base.
The answer to problems in jiujitsu is usually “move your hips,” so don’t think getting grips alone is going to save you here: you’ve got to engage your legs and hips and move. But a couple of basic grip configurations will help you get started.
Personally, I don’t do a lot of grabbing the collar when my opponent stands. Lots of people who are better than me do this, though, so don’t think it’s wrong if you wind up liking it! I just find that the collar grip is easier to break when people are standing, so since I have weak grips, I am more likely to grab a grip that’s tougher to break — like the belt. We’re not going to talk about belt grips here, but I use that as an example.
Two options that are good to start with, and also serve as jumping-off points for the more advanced open guards:
Sleeve and the heel/cuff of one pant leg: If I get a sleeve — mirror side or cross-side — this sets up fundamental attacks like my favorite sweep, the tripod sweep. I like to grab the heel of one leg, because it diminishes their mobility, and also because it allows me to play De La Riva guard. Even if you don’t do De La Riva guard, though, controlling their leg and stepping on their hip diminishes their mobility and allows you some control/attack options.
Double sleeve grips: Michael Langhi is magic with these. I like controlling sleeves because when we control sleeves, we control posts — where our partner can place their hands. If they can’t post a hand, there’s a good chance we can roll them over that direction and get on top.
Just like sleeve/heel grips are good entry points to De La Riva guard, the double sleeve grips are solid entries to the world of spider guard. When we have the sleeves, it’s a short jump to step on biceps.
Troubleshooting
But what if they get their grips before we get the chance to get ours? If they do get the grips they want, you can break their grips, of course. The great Vicente Junior, along with his black belt Lance Trippett, show some good drills for doing that:
Another option can be to re-grip, which Jason Scully shows from the top guard position here:
The more I learn about grips, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Grip fighting is a vast thing, and you won’t ever learn all you need to understand.
This post is intended to provide a framework for you to explore and to go down whatever rabbit hole of grip resources you choose — like any of the videos linked here. Check out this Reddit thread for more tips.
Demian Maia is, by any measure, one of the finest representatives of jiujitsu. You probably already know this, especially if you watched his most recent fight with Carlos Condit. It was a masterful performance against an accomplished opponent where, despite Condit knowing precisely what Maia wanted to do, Maia achieved a submission victory while taking virtually no damage.
One apparent lesson from this: despite what you might hear in certain circles, jiujitsu is a complete martial art. One less-readily apparent lesson, which is no less important: fundamentalism in any form is dangerous.
To explain what I mean, let’s start with self defense. True self defense means we train to protect ourselves from harm. This means avoiding bad situations, but also preparing for when dangerous situations arise. Being locked in a cage with a UFC-caliber fighter certainly qualifies as “dangerous.” This is why Royce Gracie’s performances in the early UFCs so animated martial artists: here was living proof that, during a no-time-limit fight with effectively no rules, a smaller opponent skilled in jiujitsu could defeat huge, dangerous attackers.
During Maia’s last four UFC fights, he’s absorbed 13 significant strikes — fewer than four per fight, against the best mixed martial artists in the world. That’s protecting yourself. That’s further testament that jiujitsu — original complete Gracie jiujitsu — is still effective.
Most of us will never fight in the cage. But there are lessons there for each of us: jiujitsu a complete art composed of striking, grappling, takedowns, and standing self-defense, along with a philosophy of self defense. Inspired by the Maia-Condit fight, the past day I’ve been re-watching Demian Maia’s DVD about stand-up techniques. It might surprise some people that Maia has an hour-long instructional of this nature, but it should only be a surprise you if you view jiujitsu through the prism of ground grappling. Original jiujitsu was designed to be a standalone martial art, and that’s the jiujitsu Maia does. As he says:
“I’ve always believed in Jiu-Jitsu as a martial art and not only a sport. That’s why I have always trained all aspects of the art. Despite being a competitor for years, I never stopped training self-defense or takedowns. I still do the same with my students today.”
This is a consistent theme in Maia’s interviews throughout the years. He’s a jiujitsu world champion, Abu Dhabi champion, and UFC title contender — but he’s never stopped training the self defense aspects of Gracie jiujitsu. He still does it all.
To me, this is an important lesson for those who are competition-focused to the exclusion of all else. Competition is fun, but — whether we’re talking about sport jiujitsu or MMA — winning awards in a setting with predictable, mutually agreed upon rules is just a part of what the art is about. It’s certainly a far cry from the early UFCs, where virtually anything went, and you had to be prepared to stand, to fight from your back, to be on top on the ground, or any other situation.
In some ways, the growth of sport jiujitsu has created incentive to specialize: one effective means to win a strategic game is to focus intently on a subset of that game, then force your opponent to play it on your terms. It’s why we see complex, ever-evolving aspects of the modern lapel guards: if you can trap someone into playing that game, and you know that game miles better than your opponent, it’s a smart way to win. This incentivizes people who are exceptional at the berimbolo, for example, to get into berimbolo-ready positions, and drill those technique to the exclusion of others. But if you’re going to do that, and only that, you’d better be able to get to that position in every situation where you might have to defend yourself.
Can you imagine a position, in grappling or fighting, where Demian Maia would be lost? I can’t. There are reasons that his jiujitsu is the subject of much study for the masterful way he moves through positions. I can’t help but think his completist approach is a reason why.
When I hear people complain about training self-defense, it’s usually because they’d rather be doing something else — like sharpening their sport tools. There’s nothing wrong with working on your favorite techniques. There is, however, something wrong with failure to develop a well-rounded skill set. There is also something wrong with failing to see self-defense techniques for what they are: techniques designed to give anyone tools to protect themselves in common situations outside of sport grappling.
It’s no secret that I love sport jiujitsu. What I dislike is fundamentalism: the attitude that what I prefer is the only pure way. It impedes learning and progress. To return to Demian Maia, he trains original, complete jiujitsu, including self defense — and finds a profound template for success there.
But this is about Demian Maia. Maia competed from white belt all the way through black belt, entering sport jiujitsu tournaments at every belt level and winning the worlds at a couple of them. Indeed, despite his status as elite fighter, he even said he’d like to take a gi jiu-jitsu competition match if the situation was right.
He’s not alone. In the upper echelons of MMA, most of the top-tier jiujitsu fighters also competed successfully in sport jiujitsu while wearing the gi. (Only Frank Mir stands out as an exception, although it’s possible I’m missing someone.)
The anti-competition argument goes that if you train sport techniques, you’ll be unprepared for a real-world confrontation. I disagree with this, both at the premise and the conclusion levels, and my reasoning could be the topic of an entirely different post. In the context of this post, though, I think both the arguments against training self defense and to competing can be answered this way: a well-rounded martial artist should at least explore both. We can learn different things from different experiences, and to reject out of hand certain experiences seems like fundamentalism.
It’s not my usual tendency to tell people what to do without being asked. We all have different goals, and success should be defined according to those goals. For those of us who want to have complete jiujitsu, though, we have to remember that the art is rooted in self defense. And for those of us that want to have the most effective self defense possible, we should consider that competition can help — not hinder — our progress toward that goal.
Demian Maia, a truly complete jiujitsu fighter, is an example of this. We could all do worse than to emulate him.
