Monthly Archives: May 2019

Mentorship

The search to become safer, better, and more capable as a self-defender and as a human being is incredibly difficult. There are no easy steps or paths. It requires a lot of blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. One way that the path can be eased somewhat is to have mentors. But what does that mean?

The term Mentor comes from the Odyssey and it was a character who was Odysseus’ son’s teacher and advisor. He came to epitomize the concept of passing wisdom to someone younger and less experienced, but did it in a personal and direct way. A mentor is not just someone you learn from, especially if there is no contact with them. While we can learn many things from books and history and the words of those who came before us, a mentor is someone who takes an intense and direct interest in us. It might be for a narrow field, or it may be for life in general.

For example, I cannot begin to get across to people how important Theodore Roosevelt was to me growing up. It was reading about him and how he fought asthma that gave me the strength at 12 years old to undertake the same fight in an aggressive and dedicated way. Without that, it is highly doubtful if I would have accomplished most of the things I have done Martial Art wise in my life. But that does not mean he was a mentor. He was dead 40 some years before I was born. My life and my path in it was not something he could have ever taken a direct interest in. He was an inspiring hero, but he was not a mentor.

I would also argue that family and friends are not mentors. Them helping and aiding you is part of what makes family and is part of friendship.

Probably the key hallmark of mentorship is an active and continuous interaction between the mentor and the mentored. Being able to constantly ask questions and seek advice on a regular basis is how you navigate difficult waters, not just get a one-and-done answer.

I have been blessed to have had actual mentors. My BJJ professor, Megaton Dias, is a key one. His lessons (many of which were physically and emotionally painful!) have helped me more than I can express. Craig Douglas, while he is also one of my closest and dearest friends, is another one. Tom Givens has gone out of his way to offer much guidance as an instructor in general and a firearms instructor in particular. Countless others have offered help and thoughts along the way, and even if they have not been on-going mentors, they have certainly helped.

So make the effort to find a mentor, and to cultivate that relationship. It takes work, but it is worth every bit you put into it.

The place for no-gi in self-defense

It is not a secret to many people that know me that I am not a huge fan of no-gi training, especially in a self-defense context.

Mostly my opposition to it revolves around a couple of things.

  1. Unless we are anticipating fighting a greased up naked dude, there is a very good chance we will have handles of some kind that we can use to improve our chance of survival. This is not to say that those handles will always be the exact equivalent of gis, but more than likely they will be something that can be used in a similar fashion. Just having the knowledge and capability of controlling the sleeves/arms of the other guy and tying him up in a way that makes it hard for him to do something violent and offensive towards you  may well be the single greatest technique to use in an entangled fight. I regularly teach, and have taught for more than 14 years, the ability for someone to use the choking strategies of BJJ and apply them to something as simple as a t-shirt. To this day, even against someone resisting violently, I have yet to have a t-shirt rip and render the choke impossible. With all that, it just makes sense that if we are truly focused on self-defense that spending the majority of our training time in the gi is a good thing.
  2. No-gi, as even its most vociferous proponents will agree, is a young man’s game. It relies on strength, speed, aggression, mobility, cardiovascular conditioning, etc. to be consistently successful. A heavy reliance which is great if you have those things but not so awesome if you don’t, and, let’s face it, it is far more likely to be true for those of us in the real world and just everyday people and not professional athletes in their physical prime. We cannot rely on those things to pull us through. In fact, we need to start with the premise that all of our opponents will be bigger, stronger, tougher, faster, meaner, more aggressive, less injured, have the initiative, and any other attribute we can think of. That needs to be our philosophical starting point.

Does that mean I am dead set against no-gi, or that I believe that is has no value at all for self-defense? I am in no way saying that. I think there are some spots that no-gi training shines, and while those spots may be less important or less necessary, does not meant they should be ignored.

Where no-gi shines is:

  1. You must actively and continuously be trying to control the other guy’s arms. Because there is no way to grab and lock down and just hold them, no-gi forces you into a very aggressive and constant attempt to secure as much control over the arms as possible. And if that control only lasts a moment, then you have to go right back to retrieving it. This is a great benefit in a self-preservation context because we must make sure that the other person cannot freely strike us or have free reign to deploy a weapon into the fight. Gi work gives you a better idea of how to control. And no-gi gets you used to fighting for it all the time.
  2. It is difficult and somewhat low percentage to fight from the bottom in no-gi. Even a great guard player is extremely restricted in his ability to attack, so the better strategy is to fight from the top or have back control. So in no-gi, you have to put a premium on constantly working to drive your hips over and to come up and be upright. And of course this may very well be the single best tactical plan if we are fighting for our lives in the street.

Even though I dislike no-gi, I do think that not only does it offer some value for self-defense, but it also is just good practice to work it on its own anyway. I follow Stephen Kesting’s dictum that BJJ training should be 80/20. 80% of the time do your preferred type or work, and 20% do the other, regardless of personal taste or preference.

Guard Attack – for Self-defense and sport

This is one of my most used guard attacks. It works across all contexts – sport competition (gi or no-gi), MMA/Vale Tudo, and self-defense, even in a weapons based environment. Note a few things: 1) with his arm locked down and in my closed guard, he is effectively limited in what he can do. Even the dreaded headbutt (a potential issue in closed guard generally) is completely prevented 2) if he tries to free his trapped arm, he gives me plenty of space to hip out to that side and presents me with multiple attacks 3) I have my other hand free to control his free arm preventing strikes, and along with the fact that the closed guard positioning of legs makes it really hard for him to access weapons, I keep safe from almost any offensive thing he can do.

In short, this is a very powerful control, and the sweep that I show flows easily from it, and typically arises from my opponent’s actions to get out of that control. It is one of my favorites.