The Collective

Grappling is an individual sport, but you need other people in order to be successful. You need a team. Every member of that team then has to be on the same page about their goals. The vast majority of people walking into a jiu-jitsu gym will not be world champions, but those people deserve as much if not more respect in training than the everyday grinders. These people are responsible for a lot of your success and improvement. They put their body on the line to allow you to get better, they give you the puzzle. Then they get up the next day broken or not and head to work, take care of their kids and live a life not all consumed by choking others unconscious. As a group the least we can do is look out for each other. This is something I wish I'd figured out earlier and now something that I try to impart to my students. You need to take care of yourself, because that's how you have a long training career, but also take care of your training partners, because if you don't you either won't have training partners or they'll be at the gym they just won't train with you. It's a hard balance I know, but the path to better jiu-jitsu may not come from the traditional last man standing philosophy, as a sport we may have to find the middle ground of super soft training and murder, death, kill. In the long run being smart and conscious about how we train leads to a better overall environment and better overall collective grappling skill.