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Watch and learn in Jiu-Jitsu

Watch and learn in Jiu-Jitsu! Many will watch – few will see. We are given countless opportunities to watch Jiu-Jitsu. Every time you go to the gym you can watch teachers, friends and training partners engage in sparring. Every competition you attend, you’ll see dozens of matches in a day. We all have the tendency to “zone out” and watch mindlessly until the only thing we see is the result. This is a wasted opportunity. Each time you observe a match, it’s a chance to train your mind to observe events and make sound decisions. Don’t just watch, interpret the action as it unfolds and make assessments as to what the athletes or your teammates are doing and what they could be doing better. The better you get at this skill, the better your game will become. This is great advice for when you are injured as well. You should stay on your schedule and still attend class and watch the rolls and study the movements. Good Jiu-Jitsu is largely the skill of sound decision making under stress. This is a skill like any other and thus requires practice and one of the best forms of practice is interpretive observation of matches. Make it a habit and soon your improvement will show itself in your game.

Understanding the human body in BJJ

Understand where the human body is strong and where it’s weak and you’ll go far in this game. We tend to think of people as strong or weak per se, but each one of us is only as strong or weak as the positioning and posture of our body at that time. For example, the arm of the strongest man is made weak when it’s put behind his back. The fastest man is made slow when his ankles are tied together. Take every opportunity to put your opponent into a physically compromising position and those impressive physical attributes of his will be severely degraded to a level you can manage easily. Deepen your understanding of these positions of weakness and soon you’ll be able to exploit them to your advantage on the mat. At the end of the day, it all comes down to technique. You will get better at it as you progress. Like if you can’t keep your posture while fatigued but can when you are not fatigued then you are simply not doing it right. Again, it will come with more practice. Nobody has it all figured out. Everyone is still learning as well, you will still be learning well after you earn your blackbelt. Everyone still gets fatigued and sometimes our technique falls apart. But knowing that it is a matter of refining our technique is the important part. For example, if you move your hip forward so that your knee, hip, and shoulder are all in a straight line and your whole body is angled away from your training partner then it is really difficult to pull you forward and break your posture. You can keep this position without any strength but as soon as your hip drops back even a small amount then you will come crashing down. This is an idealistic position but the concept is correct. In practice, you need to make small adjustments to deal with your training partners movements but that is all part of figuring it out. The quicker you start understanding the human body in BJJ, the better you will be.

Base in Jiu-Jitsu

A common question i get is about base in Jiu-Jitsu. The more explosive and powerful your opponent is on bottom the greater the need for a wide base of support to prevent being unexpectedly turned over. However, that wide base often comes at the price of control. Since your hands and feet are wide apart on the floor there is nothing holding your opponent and hence a lack of control. Your goal will be to find a satisfactory relationship between your need for a wide base of support and some kind of controlling grip that maintains enough control to get the job done while maintaining that wide base. Trapping your opponent’s head between an underhook and your own head is often the best choice. This does a good job of keeping a satisfactory compromise between width of base and physical control over the opponent. Control grips have made it easier to maintain control during transitions. Definitely a necessity. Often, many people think of ‘base’ as stability and being hard to move.  While that may be partially true, but that there’s way more to it than that. To illustrate this point, lets just suppose you’re spread-eagled on the floor.  In that position, you’re definitely stable and very hard to move, but you’re definitely not posing a danger to anyone and are very likely to get submitted in a hurry. Instead, a more useful definition of base “A platform from which to apply and absorb force.” Most of the time you’ll be pushing off your opponent to generate base, but sometimes it’ll be a wall, the cage, a car, any object, or your opponent. If you have good base then it’s hard for your opponent to push you or pull you around. But, at the same time, if you suddenly decide that you want to move your opponent, you are in a much better position to do so.

Pompton Plaines Jiu-Jitsu school promotes 1st blackbelt

Pompton Plaines Jiu-Jitsu school promotes 1st blackbelt! Training 4 Life Jiu-Jitsu, located on rt 23, promoted Joe O’ Connor to blackbelt last night making him the Jiu-Jitsu Academy’s first blackbelt. It took O’Connor 12 years of training to achieve this honor. Training for life is an affiliate school of Savarese Jiu-Jitsu, lead by 4th degree blackbelt Professor Chris Savarese. O’Connor trains under Savarese blackbelt Chris Laciura. It is also the first blackbelt that one of Savarese’s student has given making the moment special for not just O’Connor, but Savarese and Laciura as well.

Professor Savarese thoughts

Very special night for a bunch of us at Savarese Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Joe O’Connor earned his blackbelt today after 12 years of training. He ended the night with an amazing speech sharing his journey which all the lower belts can definitely learn from. He becomes the 1st blackbelt at Training4Life Martial Arts Academy and my blackbelt Chris Laciura. Chris has been an amazing student and now teacher. He is a true martial artist, he lives what he teaches and I am beyond proud of everything he has built and the job he has done w his study of Jiu-Jitsu and his ability to share it. Congrats Chris and Joe, I’m so proud of you both. It was so special for me to know that somebody that I brought from white to black was able to take my teachings and bring somebody else from white to black. It was very special to be a part of, and I want to truly thank everybody that came out to experience the night.