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If you don’t train to use the skills you learn, they are useless. There are things you can do for exercise that hurt less than martial arts if you want to get in better shape. Many of them will be more efficient. If you get into martial arts without the desire to fight, self-defense or competitively, then there’s not much point in training. In order to be able to fight you must work against resistance. Which means you have to fight to be able to fight. We can drill all the techniques in the world, but unless you can do them on someone who doesn’t want you to, it’s pointless. Theory is great, it allows for tons of super fun YouTube videos, but execution and application are what we seek. What matters is not how many techniques I know, but what I can actually do and I only know what I can do by testing it every time I train.
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I’m sure I’ve talked about this before but maybe bumping it or reframing the words will help a little more. In order to be good at something you usually must first be bad at it. There is no learning without an absence of skill and knowledge. I think this is what most adults find really difficult especially the ones currently getting into grappling. they don’t remember what it’s like to fail. Either they were sheltered by the system, by their families or they just stuck to the things that they learned from an early age and don’t remember having to learn the skills. No one learns to walk successfully, you must fall countless times and continue to do so less and less for your entire lifetime. The same is true of any skill, you must practice and fail over and over again until the number of successes far exceeds failures. That is all accomplishment is, fail less than you succeed. If you wish to improve anything, you have to accept failure. It is more frustrating, painful, and obvious in Jiu Jitsu, but also true in all things. If you actually want to do something, the only true failure is quitting.
How I do things changes all the time. How I teach, how I execute techniques, how I train, it all changes. Grappling changes, striking changes, fighting changes, technology changes and therefore you must change. I will never know everything about grappling and so I must continue learning, studying, and researching. The same is true of any endeavor. In truth whatever you think you know about something is surface level, there is no end to knowledge acquisition. At one point in history not that long ago people believed you could not run a sub 4-minute mile, now that’s a pace people keep for an entire marathon. Well, world record time is a 4.5-minute mile pace, but still in less than a century that’s how far we’ve come. Stagnation comes from complacency, which comes from overconfidence. We know nothing.
Doing anything for a long period of time will cause you to develop strengths in some areas and less strength in others. If you’ve watched Chef’s Table with Evan Funke you would see that he has a hump from rolling pasta endlessly every day all day. On a more minor scale, if you are not diversifying your physical fitness the same can happen to you with grappling. It may be stuff you do outside of class, you might take the WOD class, or for those of us who train all the time it just may be the duct tape workout. No matter how you balance your body, it is a necessary part of the rigors of training.
For the most part we are pretty mean to each other. It is a combat sport after all, but it is not life and death. In the room try not to do things that are high risk and low reward. These things include jumping on people, taking less than four fingers and peeling them backward, slamming, and striking. Everyone has a day job, and most tournaments don’t allow those things anyway. Use common sense, would you want someone to do what you were doing to them if the roles were reversed? If the answer is no, then don’t do it. As cool as it is, you are probably not a professional grappler and neither are your training partners, so flying scissor heel hooks and Marcelo Garcia backpacks don’t need to be in your repertoire. It’s a lot more fun to have training partners than to blow out people’s knees being flashy.
Why do many people stop at blue belt? I think most people stop at blue belt, because it makes you realize how much work you’ll have to do to be a black belt. Let’s say that it takes you a year and a half to get a blue belt and you continue that trend all the way to black belt, that is six years. That will probably only happen if you are training consistently with no injuries or life events. If you’ve trained, you probably know that extenuating circumstances get in the way of grappling, so it probably won’t be six years. If you’re a blue belt, you are ahead of the majority in terms of skill, so you look at that mountain and just nope your way out of continuing the climb. I understand that this is hard, but coming back is harder. It is more difficult to restart and regain the skills you lost than to stop. If Jiu Jitsu needs to take a backseat, let it, but don’t stop. You will regret it.
Here’s what I admire about every person that has a black belt from Pallaton (where I got my black belt). They show up for each other, and not just the black belts. Whether it’s a tournament, covering a class, a kids sporting event, or a celebration of something, Pallaton shows up. It’s probably why I feel so strongly that coaches should show up for their athletes. I go to tournaments all the time and don’t see coaches for a lot of people that’s so strange to me. At the very least send someone who knows what they’re doing to shout instructions. Even in terms of classes, if there is anything more than an instructor and a bunch of white belts, there’s no reason class should be canceled because you can’t find someone to teach. It’s reciprocal, by showing up when other people need you, they show up when you need them. Honestly, someone can make the time if they want to, I know because I’m a Pallaton black belt.
Let’s put something into perspective. I have trained for almost 22 years, even if I averaged one class a week for all 22 years that still means I have been in over 1,000 grappling classes. As most of you know I average more than one class a week, and it’s still not easy. It might be easier than it used to be, but I would also say it’s different. I am still hard on myself, I still get frustrated when I don’t execute, that it’s hard to do doesn’t change. Why it’s difficult does. There’s always someone who can stick you to the ground or submit you at will that doesn’t change. You have to love the process, the struggle, the grind. You have to redefine success. You will never have all the answers and that’s okay. This is not an instant gratification activity, in 6 months you might feel like you know something, or a year, or 5 years, or never. Jiu Jitsu will always be miserable unless you find a way to want to do it, because it’s not changing that it’s hard to accommodate you.
I want everyone who walks through the door to become a black belt. That is a goal I have, but all the black belts I know are crazy like me. They like the grit, show up in any circumstance, sacrifice the world outside for the sake of Jiu Jitsu. That’s not for everyone, and it’s weird to me, but it’s something I have to accept. What we do is aggressive, it’s violent, it’s not something that you can be casual about if you want to be successful quickly. What is required to be a black belt is not the same as just wanting to show up and learn to grapple, but no matter what embracing the difficulty is part of the journey. If you don’t have a part of you that appreciates a beating grappling won’t be very fun.
Here’s what’s interesting about grappling in my opinion, you are probably never getting beaten up as bad as you could be by the people that are better than you. It happened all the time when I was coming up that I would start thinking I was having success or I was doing better, and although that was true, my training partners had another level or six. I can almost guarantee that anybody who is better at Jiu Jitsu than you is coasting at whatever level you will let them when rolling. The whole martial art is predicated on “efficiency” which is code for how lazy can I be and win, so they’ll just keep moving that benchmark until one day hopefully that goalpost stays put or you start moving your carrot.
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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
January 2025
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