I’m excited to announce my first webinar, March 21, covering halfguard in self-defense.

I am confident that it will accomplish a multiple number of things in one compact and easy to watch package :

1) for those who don’t know anything about grappling, it will be an easy to grasp set of techniques and concepts to give the new person a bit of a bigger picture on how taking the fight to the bad guy on the ground can look

2) for those who have some BJJ, it will be a focused look at an excellent game plan for attacking and being aggressive from guard that is less attribute dependent than some other guards

3) for those who are not familiar with using a weapon in an entangled fight, this is about as good a place to start to learn as anything out there

4) for those who have some idea of fighting in a weapon based environment, it gives a good solid look at one of the most useful set of moves that there is

All of that is a tall order for a single two hour webinar, but I know I am not promising something that I cannot deliver.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/webinar-grappling-in-a-weapons-based-environment-halfguard-tickets-136853284859

Every time someone new starts jiu-jitsu, I hear the same refrain – “man, I thought my cardio was good but I am wiped out after a one hour class!” If you have not experienced it, the conditioning requirements of BJJ are different, and it is eye opening.

Even if you truly do have solid cardio beforehand, you will still come close to feeling that giant ball of suck that is oppositional pressure in BJJ and what it pulls out of you. You can be able to run a 5k, do 10 x 100m sprints, do 100 burpees in 4 minutes, and crush that WOD at your Crossfit gym, and still be an empty rag at the end of a BJJ class.

Why is that? There are a few reasons.

The first is that in jiu-jitsu, you are going to be using your body in ways you most likely have never done before. Even experienced and trained athletes rarely work the body the way that grappling does. Few people use and work your hips in the manner and to the extent you will in BJJ, and your core is engaged almost constantly, as are your grips. Firing all those muscles constantly when you are not used to it is exhausting.

Secondly, using all those muscles in new ways is going to be done in a generally inefficient manner. Any strength and conditioning coach will tell you that inefficient movement leads to more energy and calorie burn and that is partially why it is good for fat loss. One of the reasons they will advise someone to change programs now and again is that once your body acclimates to the movement, it becomes more efficient, which when you are trying to burn as many calories as possible is not what we want, so a good S&C trainer will try to keep you with inefficient movement to maximize the burn.

However, the single biggest reason that outside cardio does not translate very well at the beginning is due to stress. Or in more appropriate jiu-jitsu terms, panic.

When you do BJJ for the first time, you tend to be terrified on some level, and desperate to get this bigger person off you or prevent them from choking you. Every part of your body is coiled and tensed, and you are exerting 100% effort constantly to try to not die. You go through whatever energy reserves you have in the blink of an eye. Fairly shortly, you strongly resemble a fish that jumps out of its tank and is now gasping huge gulps trying to stay alive. And the horrible part is that there is no relief, because even as you learn techniques and actions and movement, you are still in a partial panic. You know no matter what, that higher belt is going to be on top and inching forward to that armbar or choke or leglock or…….. The end is near, and there is little to nothing you can do about it. That causes blind panic even when you don’t think you are panicking.

You can get a glimpse of that situation right now. Tense up your entire body as hard as you possibly can, very muscle and tendon and ligament straining as if you are being crushed under a collapsing ceiling and you need to hold it up. Keep it up for 10 seconds, and relax. How strained and sore are those muscles right now? How hard are you breathing? And that is only after 10 seconds. Imagine a non-stop hour or two. And that is why you are so used up after your early BJJ practices.

This is one of the reasons that whenever I hear someone say “let me get in some shape first, and then I will do jiu-jitsu”, I tell them it doesn’t matter. Whether they start right now in the condition they are in, or they do a three month program of cardio, they are still going to feel like they have no cardio at all. The only people I have seen come to BJJ and not experience this are wrestlers and judoka, because they are already used to their energy and body movement. Everyone else, from that world champ Crossfitter to the ex-D1 football player, will suffer.

The good news is that this does not last. Very soon your body will adapt, and you will get in jiu-jitsu shape. More importantly to those of us in the self-defense world, you will be in shape to deal with a violent criminal actor who tries to assault you. S

So just start training now. The results come when you put the time in. BJJ is the ultimate democracy. You will get better if you just get on the mat and start.

I tend to be known as “the jiujitsu guy”. And that is fine because I do love jiujitsu, and I heartily believe in what all can be gained from training in it. However, while I have been doing BJJ for 32 years, I am about to enter my 42^nd year of training martial arts and hand-to-hand fighting. I tend to not throw my resume in people’s faces all the time so it is a bit understandable if they can be lazy about how they think about my lane. And every now and then I need to let others know that the depth and breadth of my experience is more than just rolling around in pajamas with sweaty dudes.

Case in point is my long love, study of, and training in Boxing. I was championing boxing as a martial art and a great fighting system in the early 80’s, and I have spent a lot of time working that methodology. I have even fought in a couple of smokers (essentially unsanctioned “gym” fights for pay) when I was at a gym called Top Level run by a great coach named Paavo Ketonnen. I have had a deep love for this system for a long time.

I have a big collection of boxing books including of course history and stories and biographies of fighters, but the ones I have read the most are the instructional. I have a ton of them, going back a long time. My earliest edition is form 1887, and I have some original first editions of instructional from 1903 and 1906. I have spent a great deal of time going deep into them all, and hands down the best one I have ever seen, is Boxing by the US Navy from 1943.

It is one of the very few that actually teaches the concepts behind the punches and truly gets the principals and techniques across as well as can be presented by the printed word (there will always be things missing that can only be seen in actual movement) and is pretty comprehensive.

Unfortunately, as with many great books, it is long out of print. However, it has been reprinted multiple times and sometimes a copy of one of those can be found online used. If you get the chance to own or even just read an edition, take it! You will not be disappointed.

There are a lot of things to remember about what we have to do in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Hundreds of techniques, different positions, thousands of counters, a large number of principles and concepts that we have to be doing at all times; in short, a long list of things to not forget, and all of it can be altered in the blink of an eye by what our partner does. It can be daunting, especially to the beginner, thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how we are going to remember any of it in the heat of the moment all while another person is trying to choke us into unconsciousness.

There are a number of mantras that try to help us put this into understandable chunks. Perhaps the most famous in Jiu-Jitsu is “position before submission”. All of these are good and useful but what I have found as an instructor that works particularly well even with complete beginners are three simple words. They are: grips and hips.

What I mean by that is that most things in Jiu-Jitsu are only accomplished when you have good and superior grips and your hips are dominating the fight (i.e. can exert more control over your opponent’s hips and base). It doesn’t really matter how good you are at a particular technique if your opponent has his grips and he is shutting down your hip movement. Conversely, if you have superior grips and you can use your hips in the manner that you want to, you will find that you can make a lot of techniques work even if they are not your particularly best performed ones. 

Techniques are not the important part of the fight. Techniques are only guidelines to physical action. The key factors are what are the drivers that allow those physical actions. Base, posture, position, pressure, are some key ones that are not attribute based, as well as the idea of keep breathing (it may be shocking but beginners forgetting to breath is a chronic event). Similarly, the simple focused idea of always fighting for the best grip possible, and always fighting for the best hip position is easy to remember and does not have to be tied to a specific way of doing it. My methods of using my hips and establishing my grip may be best for me, but for you, another method may be superior. Think of any technique that shows those things as guidelines and suggestions, but don’t get bogged down in them and go into mental vaporlock trying to remember them in the middle of training. 

Watch this short video of a master of grips and hips. Note how Mateus always makes the adjustments on both that keeps him in control. Every successful attack is preceded by a solid control of these two things (also take VERY careful note that after each attack he takes the time to stabilize his post-attack position by making sure he has new established grip and hip superiority so he does not get reversed or countered):

To sum up, don’t try to remember every technique all the time. Remember the principles and framework of jiu-jitsu. If you can consistently do that, you will learn to see the appropriate time for the technique.

When in doubt, get grips and hips!

When it comes to being a good instructor we can talk about a lot of things. We can discuss not having your ego in the way and that it’s about your student and not you, or we can talk about being enthusiastic about the material, or we can discuss truly caring about making your student better, or we can talk about being a good and continuing student yourself. But perhaps the most important aspect to being a good instructor is something that is little discussed.

That little discussed part is the inherent belief in your own fallibility. We have to always assume that we don’t know everything and that we can be wrong at any given moment. We have to remember that we’ve been wrong in the past, we are probably wrong about something in the present and we will certainly be wrong at some point in the future. 

It is easy as a successful instructor to start to believe your own hype. You most certainly will have students who are very happy with your teaching and will pat you on the back. Perhaps your peers and even people you look up to as mentors will also compliment you on your prowess . While this is something that makes you feel good it can also be Insidious and lead you to believe that you are perfect. And none of us are. Ever.

All of us , from the newest teacher to the instructor who has been doing it for 40+ years, are susceptible to the same things. We can be wrong. We won’t know everything at all times. We may not have the depth of experience to be able to properly instruct every single student that comes across our threshold. Understanding that is key to making sure that we  are always testing ourselves and our material and our instructional capability by diligent study and making sure we have people who can help keep us in check.

This is an important aspect  – i.e. apprenticeship –  that is lost on many people in today’s modern society where apprenticeship is not really followed or understood in most areas. Unlike most of the centuries past where all the important skills in society were passed down from Master to Apprentice, today people, thanks to the internet and even more so social media, can start to believe they know things before they truly KNOW things.  Having a mentor or mentors who can guide you on your path and help to steer you correctly as well as having peers and friends who care enough about you to call  you on your own BS when appropriate is a key part of ensuring that you are always going to be doing your best as a teacher to your own students.

Don’t believe your own hype, assume you may have stumbled and made a mistake, and find trusted people that you can rely on to keep you moving forward in the best way possible. Only then do we deserve the title of teacher.

Few things are sadder to me than someone refusing to see a better path.

I was reading a book last night that was a recently written instruction manual dealing with defensive firearms use, and the author was a 25 year LEO who had a lot of time with the firearm being taught. It was fine until I got to the part where he – in writing – says that another technique is probably superior, but that he is too old and set in his ways to change. Say what?

I cannot wrap my head around that. He has seen the other technique and has seen how well it works, but because he has put time into something else he refuses to alter what he does? That is not admirable, nor is it about integrity or dedication. It is the exact opposite in fact.

Refusing to go to something better is just foolish. Regardless of how long you have done something, if something demonstrably better comes along, you need to accept it. If that makes you a student rather than a “guru”, then so be it.

I had multiple decades in other martial arts before I did much BJJ. I had deep dives in 8 or 9 different systems, with instructor certifications in most of those. At the same time, I probably dabbled in 20+ other methods ranging from a few years to a few weeks of training. Many of them I very much enjoyed and was pretty good at, and most of those were the accepted “cool” martial arts, especially in the 80’s and 90’s. Moreover, the ones I was an instructor in were fairly easy to teach. I could look good and made people believe I was some fighting master, even if I was out of shape, and did not require a lot of effort to teach or demonstrate. And even better, the techniques and methods were kind of flashy at times and new people quickly felt like they could use them. That is a proven way to keep students.

I could have easily spent my time continuing to do those arts. I had every reason to do so. Except for one overwhelming contrary reason that kept poking me in the brain. I FOUND A BETTER WAY. I found a method/delivery system that was more combat effective, and worked for more people, and could be maintained for a lifetime. It meant I had to humble myself and be a student again, and I had to admit to people that what I did before was not as good as I thought or portrayed, and it also meant I had to work much, much harder as a teacher to teach the new material.

So I switched to the combat sports template I have been practicing and teaching for the past 25 years. At times I wished I had stayed teaching mindless patterns of movement because it would have made my life easier. Easier to teach, and I would not have had to stay on top of my own personal performance the way I have to now. But that is morally, intellectually, and physically lazy. It would also be ethically corrupt to teach potentially lifesaving skills that I knew to be sub-optimal.

Don’t be like the author I talked about. Always challenge yourself, and if there is a better way, then go to that path no matter what it means. You only cheat yourself when you ignore that.