Everyone is capable of doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. If you walk into any gym, you’ll see people of many capabilities and walks of life. One of the keys to longevity and success in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is adapting how your body works to what you want to accomplish. One way to figure out a game that suits you is to look at other grapplers with your body style. For me Marcelo Garcia, Josh Hinger, Andre “Maneco”, and Rodolfo Vieira have parts of their game that I watch closely for my own personal style. If you are interested in finding people who have similar body composition, ask your instructor for recommendations. I would say the same goes for other martial arts as well.
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In sixteen years of BJJ, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I’ve learned. Except at the same time I still know it. Sometimes in the middle of a roll I find myself in situations where I can use some niche attack I learned 10 years ago. As students, your instructor is a bigger resource than you realize. What we execute and what we know are different, and asking questions after class is a great way to build a diverse game. You just never know when a little OG BJJ will come in handy.
As I’ve said, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is hard. At times it can seem like the techniques are impossible. I don’t believe that there are any impossible techniques in BJJ. It’s a matter of how much work you are willing to put into executing that part of your game. Repetitive practice is the key to committing a move to your game. If you are not someone who believes in drilling, then setting a goal for each training session becomes increasingly more important. Work on the techniques that you wish to implement in your game whenever you can, and you will begin to see success.
Small victories are an important part of the Jiu Jitsu journey, especially in the beginning. If you don’t come in with some kind of prior knowledge of grappling or athletic prowess, the first six months can be trying. Just like setting goals, small victories are a way of convincing yourself you are figuring things out. Surviving, escaping, or even mounting slight offense where you usually struggle can be very motivating. Small victories never really stop, as there will always be people that are stylistically harder to deal with, and soon enough the small victories lead to bigger victories.
There are many don’ts in BJJ. Often Professors (myself included) speak in absolute terms and gloss over what makes these rules we follow. For the most part these cardinal laws are grey areas, that given the correct circumstance are totally false. Alas, as teachers we must give the options that provide the greatest chance of success. Therefore the outlier techniques become forbidden. My truth is that I know plenty of people who execute techniques that go against conventional wisdom. The caveats are they are extremely skilled and they have failed miserably attempting those techniques until it became an effective part of their game. There are no absolute do’s or don’ts in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but if you’re gonna do weird stuff, you might get whacked. That can be fun sometimes.
Anytime you read a Jiu-Jitsu blog, you'll run across a post about setting goals. This is something that I think a lot of people dismiss. It might be because they're white belts in a room of purple and up, or maybe it just seems like one of the many BJJ clichés. However, having goals does improve your Jiu-Jitsu. For me some of the ways I set goals are by watching competition footage and implementing the effective techniques in rolls and having my training partners set goals for me. By allowing my training partners to pick what I'm working on it makes my techniques more effective, because they already know what they need to look out for. For a newer practitioner, defensive positions, pass/stop drills, and ladders are all good places to work on goals. These are opportunities to work on specific areas of your game. Since they're more focused, you can eliminate the multitude of options that can make a full roll overwhelming, and hone in on a specific skill set. If you set specific goals, and hold yourself accountable, you should experience an exponential growth rate in your execution during training.
A key element of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is misalignment. It is integral in the execution of many techniques. Not only does this apply to the angle changes necessary for sound BJJ, but also in dictating the actions of your opponent. For many reasons people are very attached to their heads, and this can be exploited for your benefit. When you move someone’s head, their body follows. Therefore if you control their body in the opposite direction of their head, many of their physiological mechanisms will no longer be as good. This will induce the controlled chaos state I’ve previously discussed, and open opportunities. Think about how your control points are working to create multiple focuses as a distraction for the primary attack.
Should Jiu-Jitsu be hard? I believe primarily it should be. At the end of the day you are learning a combat art, and should you ever have to use what you learn in a situation outside of the gym, it's better to feel like you've been there before. A fight is a stressful situation, and part of what hard training does is improve critical thinking in sequential order under duress. By training hard you are improving skills that are both physical and psychological, and benefit you in ways that have nothing to do with fighting or grappling. I know it sounds like I'm advocating for every match to be for gold at the Mundials, but that's not the case. Training hard is something that has levels. Training hard in the beginning is working on mental fortitude, dealing with chaos and claustrophobia. As you progress training hard becomes about imposing your will and not conceding to those near your skill level, or acquiring new skills against lower ranks. As an instructor and training partner I know that pushing yourself gets results. I've seen it with myself and people I've trained. It's scary for sure, but it's also good.
"There's no growth in the comfort zone, and no comfort in the growth zone" dI went back home last week and trained with my Pallaton BJJ family. Something that kept coming up was the center line concept. The physics of fighting, and in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu sense grappling relies on dominating an imaginary central line in your opponent and yourself. Understanding the center line concept allows for the creation of advantageous angles. In no combat scenario do I recommend staying straight in front of someone and attempting to mount an offense. Percentage-wise, such a strategy is at best a 50/50 proposition, so how do we adjust this dynamic in our favor? We use the center lines. Every person has two center lines, vertically through the middle of their nose and horizontally at the top of the pelvis. Successful offense comes from moving my center line to one side of my opponent. The horizontal bisection is strongly biased towards lowering your center line for efficient attacks, whereas the vertical bisection is preference based towards your attacking side. In any case whether separately or used in conjunction, analyzing your angle of approach is "shockingly effective".
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AuthorThis is the blog page of Chuva BJJ. It's where you will find information that seems pertinent to the academy. Archives
February 2025
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