by Stephan Kesting

As is so often the case, Mark Twain said it best: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” This applies to dogs, grapplers, MMA fighters and jiu-jitsu players alike.

Obviously a grappling match is a physical and technical battle, but having a strong will to win gives you the edge when technical and physical attributes are closely matched. The size of fight in the dog (or the will to fight of the jiu-jitsu practitioner) is not constant however, and sometimes it can disappear altogether. When you’re sparring you can sometimes feel the exact moment when your opponent’s will to fight slips away. All of a sudden he doesn’t want to be there anymore, his movements and techniques lack conviction, and often he offers you easy submissions just to bring the match to an end.

The ebb and flow of your will to fight can be influenced by many things, but the two huge negative factors are 1) exhaustion, and 2) frustration. Both of these factors can absolutely sap your will to fight. In this article we’re going to take a look at preventing these fight killers.

1) EXHAUSTION The most obvious reason for getting exhausted is that you might be out of shape. You don’t have to be fat to be out of shape: you might be skinny but if you’re not challenging your lungs and muscles at regular intervals then it is unlikely that you’re going to be in grappling shape. What can you do about it? Check out these resources (all are previous articles and tips on Grapplearts.com):

• All else being equal, work on your endurance
• ‘Cardio’ for martial artists
• My default cardio workout
• Going anaerobic, part 1
• Going anaerobic, part 2
• Going anaerobic, part 3

If you ARE in good shape but still find yourself regularly exhausted while grappling then there might be some other factors at work: You might be holding your breath while grappling.

and/or

Someone might be blocking you from breathing with their weight – choking your diaphragm. Escaping this often requires bridging, but not really to escape the position. Initially at least your bridging will be more about creating room to shift your body slightly and get his weight off your diaphragm.

and/or

You might be getting smothered, making it hard to breath, leading to exhaustion, leading to your will to fight vanishing.

and/or You might be freaking out and wasting all your energy due to claustrophobia, a condition often undiagnosed among grapplers. Learn how other grapplers recognized and dealt with this condition.

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by Jason Scully

I would like to talk about what makes a good training partner. This is something that really isn’t discussed to often, but I feel it is also important. If your training partners aren’t that good it can really effect your results.

I mean you can’t train this stuff by yourself unfortunately. Below are some things that I feel make a good training partner.

First we have to think in terms of how you’re drilling, as there are different ways and I’ll talk about this more in-depth in another thread. Then after that, is a list of general things a good partner should have or do.

1. Dead Pattern Training – No resistance from your partner. Usually done when you are learning a brand new move
2. Progressive Resistance Drilling - Gradual resistance given by your partner. Added once you start feeling more comfortable with the movements
3. Semi-Live/Flow/Slow Rolling – Rolling live with your partner at a pace that is not usually more then 50% of your max effort and you both match each others pace without muscling movements and exploding out of things
4. Live Rolling – This is where you both go with 75% to 100% of you max effort and you are both trying to get the best of each other. You are trying to time your movements correctly to catch your partner off guard and he is defending with full resistance and visa versa.

Ok, now onto what makes a good partner in my opinion in each area. Now when you read this and you think of it. Think of it not only in a manner of what or how your partner should be reacting when he is working with you, but also how YOU should be reacting when you are a partner yourself.

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by Bill Thomas-

Jiu Jitsu Make You Nervous?

Ever been nervous before a fight? Tight knot in your stomach, sweaty palms, wondering what you are doing and why you are here? Are you ready? Did you train hard enough? Are you out of your league? Are you going to get hurt? Are you going to look foolish?

It’s cool, almost cold. The sun is still an hour away from coming up as you finish breakfast and break camp. You feel the presence of the immense granite mountain, even though you can’t see it yet. As the light starts to penetrate the valley floor you see your goal for the first time today. A stone perch hovering 3000 feet above the ground. A world away and more than 1/2 a mile straight up. El Captain awaits.

You get ready to make your climb. No gear, just your fingers and a bag of chalk hung from your belt. You walk up to the face of the cliff and start. Wedging your hands into tiny rock fissures and then dangling from your fingertips as you grope upwards for the next handhold.

In 1958 a team of experienced adventure climbers became the first to successfully reach the top of El Captain in Yosemite Park. The used ropes and anchors of all kinds. They made the ascent in just 47 days. Today with modern equipment and the knowledge gained from thousands of ascents, good teams take an average of only 4-5 days to make the climb.

Alex Honnold does it in less than 6 hours.

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by Stephan Kesting

Life is a balancing act, and most of us have multiple priorities. We have to juggle BJJ with work, family life, relaxation time, etc. A couple of days away from training never killed anybody. In fact, we’re usually refreshed and eager to get back at ‘er when we return!

But sometimes the breaks are longer than a couple of days. Life intervenes, and before you know it weeks, or even months have gone by and you’ve only trained once or twice:(

It’s easy to get down about this and want to throw in the towel altogether, but hear me out. Training layoffs are normal, and ultimately inevitable. They happen to everyone.

Ecclesiastes (and the Byrds) had it right: “to everything there is a season.” It just wasn’t your BJJ season for a while…

I’m a black belt and a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on grappling and BJJ. But this doesn’t make me immune to ups and downs in my own training.  One of my dirty little secrets is that my own training suffers every time I’m working on a new Grapplearts video. For example, I’m working on a soon-to-be-released video project right now, and because of the long hours spent writing, designing, filming and editing, I’ve been lucky to get on the mats once a week.

Kind of ironic, isn’t it? I’m working on a tool to give everyone else’s grappling skills a huge boost, but at the same time it causes my own skills to temporarily decline… (Don’t get me wrong, I’m NOT complaining about making videos. I work on these projects because I love doing them. I just hope that admitting this it puts things into perspective a little bit.)

You see, training layoffs and slow-downs no longer freak me out. I know that whatever is making training difficult will eventually pass and I’ll be able to get back into it full-bore! A BJJ black belt usually takes 9 to 12 years, so you’re definitely in this for the long haul. And on that timescale things are going to come up in EVERYBODY’S life, no matter who you are.

Let’s get a bit more specific…

Say that things get crazy for you at work. You’re putting in 70 hours a week at the office. You barely have time to brush your teeth, let alone sneak away three times a week for your usual training sessions.

It may take a few months, but then you finally get things under control and are ready to get your life back. Time to start training again!

I’m not gonna lie to you; your first couple of sessions probably won’t be pretty… In fact, there are TWO areas where you’re probably going to be most challenged in your game.

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by Krista Scott-Dixon

I am often asked two questions by well-meaning male instructors:

1. How do I get more women to join my school?
2. And once they join, how do I keep them?

Good questions.

Before I answer them, here are a couple of crucial things to understand.

But why encourage women in grappling at all?

It’s important to recognize that most of the features about your gym that make it welcoming to women also make it welcoming to the 95% of grapplers that aren’t 18-year-old, superfit, natural male athletes who will thrive no matter what you give them. (And those 5% will probably appreciate the improvements too.)

Key point: Making a school and a space that welcomes all ages, shapes, abilities, and skill levels makes a better space for everyone.

It’s not a zero-sum game where some people suffer because other people get stuff. Everyone wins here.

If you’re running an elite facility that only takes top-notch athletes, you probably don’t need to read this article because your athletes will find you, and they’ll stay with you no matter how much your facility sucks — if it gives them what they want. But until people refer to your training facility as “The ___ Camp” during commentary on the UFC, it’s probably safe to assume that you want as many grapplers as possible on your mats.

The benefits of diverse training partners

Hey guys, how do you get better at BJJ? By going ape on other giant dudes all the time, right? Wrong.

If you’re male, consider the fact that training with all kinds of body types, skill levels, and abilities will improve your game. Whether you need to learn to dial it up or down, or make particular modifications, the finesse you develop from doing so will help you in the long run.

If you can develop the sensitivity to respond to the nuances of your partner — whoever that partner is — then it means you develop the sensitivity to make your game excellent.

Black belts are black belts because they can sense tiny deviations in their partner’s positions, and optimize those deviations efficiently to suit their own goals. They aren’t black belts because they act like Hulk. They can throw you because they can sense when you shift ten grams of your weight to the right, not because they run into you like a demented rhino.

Learn sensitivity to all your training partners and you too can do the ten-gram throw one day.

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by Stephan Kesting and Mark Mullen

I’ve been grappling for many years, and here’s a situation that comes up all the time…

I often spar younger, heavier, beginners. At the end of the round they’re usually fighting for breath, arms trembling from fatigue. They stagger unsteadily to their feet and croaks through parched lips “Man….(huff! puff!) I really need (gasp! pant!)…to work on my (huff! puff!)…cardio!”

When this happens I usually offer a few words of advice. Typically I say something about learning how to relax while rolling and trying to conserve one’s strength as a matter of strategy (not to say self preservation!).

You see, the truth is that their cardiovascular conditioning may very well be far more superior to my own. These beginners will also often be solidly muscled, having spent years in the weight room gobbling creatine capsules.

So why are they so exhausted and I’m not?

There are a number of answers to this question – and few of them have anything to do with VO2 Max or other widely accepted measures of cardiovascular fitness and maximal aerobic power.

Here Are 4 Reasons You Might be Getting Tired

1) NOT being as efficient as possible. Josh Russell, head instructor of my BJJ academy teaches nearly every class (3 per night). He also attends all of the open mat sessions and, without fail, rolls with the toughest, most skilled grapplers at each session. That’s a lot of hard rolling in any given week. When I asked him how he managed to maintain that level of activity in a given week (and stay injury free) he said simply “I try to be as efficient as possible in every movement and position”.

I thought about this during the next several weeks of training and freshly examined my own efficiency in the various positions.

* Was I using timing to execute the escape at the opportune moment, OR trying to force the opponent when he had turned all of his attention to preventing my escape?

* Was I using a little extra power in pushing with my arms to create space, OR was I making the noninituitive effort to move my hips to create space to regain my guard?

* Was I allowing the opponent to settle his weight on me then struggling to move, OR was I using fluid movement to prevent him from even establishing his position and anchors in the scramble?

There are many instances in a roll where you can identify a more efficient method of advancing position or escaping

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by Stephan Kesting

Stephan: Hi guys, I’m here with Emily Kwok. Emily is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, she’s had some MMA fights and done very well (which is to say she’s won), she’s got a shelf full of medals from the Mundials and the Pan Ams (gi and no gi), and she’s also a friend of mine. And as such, I think she’s qualified to discuss a couple of topics.

I’d like to start out by asking you about about fighting the larger, stronger opponent, because as a woman, you’re going to be dealing with that all the time. And also training as a woman, because it’s really not something I’m qualified to talk about.

Emily: Really? (laughing)

Stephan: Yeah, I promise. As long as those photos from college don’t come out, I’m good! So take us through your jiu-jitsu history, just to give people a bit of a background of where you’re coming from.

Emily: Sure. I started jiu-jitsu about 10 years ago in Vancouver, my hometown, where you and I met. I started out there training with a blue belt, and really, it was kind of by coincidence that I stumbled into jiu-jitsu.

My trainer, Roy Duquette, was trying to help me find some sort of a sport to help out with my physical fitness because in college, I wasn’t really happy with the way I looked or felt. I tried boxing. I tried working out at the gym and I wasn’t getting results. So he suggested that I might try some ground fighting, and of course, I had no idea what that was.

Stephan: A lamb to the slaughter…

Emily: I actually started out in a Sambo class that didn’t work out so well because there were some very masculine personalities that wanted to teach me how to escape wristlocks for a month and that got very boring.

So I moved on to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. That was suggested to me by a classmate. And I thought it was really on and interesting and somewhat thrilling.

And at the same time, I saw there was one girl in the class and I admired the fact that she could pass the guard, which was a new thing to me at the time, and I told myself that I wanted to learn how to do that.

So I started training in a small community center under a blue belt named John Kefalonitis. I trained there for a couple of months and then moved to New York City over the summer. And when I was in New York, all of my teammates at home said “look, you’ve got to look up a Gracie, the Gracies are there.” And I had no idea what “a Gracie” was.

So I looked up Renzo Gracie and tried out his school. At that time I was a white belt: I stayed there a few months and got some good fundamentals.

Then I moved back to Vancouver where I started training with Denis Kang. I started with him because some of my classmates said “he has excellent technique and he’s an up and coming fighter: you might really enjoy it.” So, I started with Denis and that’s where actually you and I met because you used to come in and substitute teach for Denis sometimes.

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by Tal Williams

I was put to task to write something about Brazilian jiu jitsu. I’m not going to teach you any bad ass moves that will ensure metaphoric death to your foes because I don’t know them, and it also doesn’t go with the title. I thought I’d write about some of the key aspects of training the ideal way and some of the challenges that come with it. These are some of the things that have stymied my progress and are the three key things I’d like to get closer to the ideal.

1: Consistency

You have to train more than twice a week every week to make real progress in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Sure, you will get better going 1 or 2 days a week but your progress will be similar to the evolution of man. You will be the homo habilis of jiu jitsu. The people who are there 7 days a week will be the ubermensch.

Lately I haven’t been as consistent as I used to be. We all have reasons why we aren’t training with the frequency jiu jitsu idealism demands. Sometimes the rigors of employment, traffic, and life in general leave me with a deep yearning for couches, televisions and McDonalds and jiu jitsu becomes another task or destination. I almost always find that when I am able to fight through this feeling and go to the gym I feel better about life and I’m glad that I got another training session in. Sometimes, shit happens and missing class is unavoidable. We can’t do anything about that. My goal is to try be more consistent and fight through excuses to avoid training

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by Ormond Morford

My name is Ormond Morford and my friends thought I was crazy to try jiu-jitsu at my age…too old, too fat and too inflexible. This is a young man’s game and walking through the dojo door that first day, I thought maybe I was a little nuts, too.

I had decided to take jiu-jitsu when I retired three years ago at sixty years old. I needed something to keep me motivated to get regular exercise, including lots of stretching. I had always been interested in martial arts and jiu-jitsu seemed like something I could do. Although I had never done any wrestling, it did not appear too complicated or difficult. So I thought that I would give it a try.

I soon discovered that I could not beat the younger guys through strength and determination alone. They were so much stronger, more limber and quicker than me. The first few classes I attended were discouraging. I seemed to leave each class with a new set of bruises. What was I thinking?! The harder I tried, the more bruised and beat up I got.

My instructor, Chris Jones, at Durango Martial Arts said that I was trying too hard and to just relax. I had always been fairly strong and had done some kickboxing in my younger years, so I had assumed that I just needed to apply that approach with increased determination to jiu-jitsu. However, that is not how jiu-jitsu works and it slowly dawned on me that my instructor was right. When I was trying hard, I was probably doing it wrong.

Armbars, triangle chokes, kimuras and omoplatas… it was all a mystery to me. It took me about six months to relax and just focus on learning the leverage and techniques that apply to jiu-jitsu rather than trying to muscle my opponent around. I began to get a little more limber and learn the basic positions of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Then I could start learning about the various submissions.

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by Stephan Kesting,

This may sound a bit weird coming from a guy who runs a grappling site, but I want you to ask yourself a question: why on earth are you spending hours and hours rolling around on the ground with men wearing spandex and/or pajamas?

Really… I mean it’s not the easiest of activities.  And it’s sweaty and sometimes it’s even painful…

Obviously there’s self defense benefits to training, but if that was your only concern then you should just buy a gun!

There are health and fitness benefits, sure, but wouldn’t it be easier to just hire a personal trainer a few times a week?

I think that a large part of the appeal of grappling is that it ISN’T a walk in the park!

We don’t train because it’s easy.  We train because it’s hard!

And the major milestones in your training – attending your first class, competing in your first tournament, getting your black belt – function as a sort of rite of passage, which is something that we’ve mostly lost in our society.

We have to remind ourselves that in bygone times rites of passage weren’t easy.  There was no guarantee of success.

But you need the possibility of failure to get the transformation and transcendence.

Let’s look at some historical rites of passage.  Not only is there the possibility of failure, but many of them were actually pretty brutal.

Did you see the movie 300?  Do you remember the flashback to King Leonidas killing the wolf as a teenager?  That was actually part of the brutal krypteia ritual that young Spartan men had to undergo in order to come of age.  And not all of them survive.

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