Savarese Jiu-Jitsu student wins double Gold at NY Open

Savarese Jiu-Jitsu student wins double Gold at NY Open

Savarese Jiu-Jitsu student wins double Gold at NY Open! Congrats to Savarese BJJ student Thomas Thibodeaux on winning double GOLD at the NY Open today and to his teammate Darren Pardo for earning bronze at the same tournament! Love that you guys are always trying to better yourselves and are committed to being the best version of yourself. Not being scared to fail is one of the keys to success. Proud of you both!

Savarese Jiu-Jitsu Team places 2nd at PBJJF tournament

Savarese Jiu-Jitsu Team places 2nd at PBJJF tournament

Savarese Jiu-Jitsu Team places 2nd at PBJJF tournament! Congrats to the Savarese BJJ competition team who placed 2nd in the team standings at the PBJJF at Fairleigh Dickinson University today. I am so proud of everyone who stepped up and tested themselves. Proud not just because you won but because you weren’t scared to fail. That is how you get better. Everyone was awesome but major props to Juelz Hernandez, who won GOLD 🥇in his division winning every match by submission in his first tourn ever!
Juelz Hernandez 🥇
Lawrence Zeppetelli 🥇
Ed Joaquin 🥇
Darren Pardo 🥇
Orlando Rodrigues 🥈
James DeFazio 🥈
Thomas Thibodeaux 🥈
Mariana Vasquez 🥉
Nick Rossano Jr. 🥉
Anthony Samaniego 🥉
Tom Thibodeaux Jr 🥉
All of you are better because of the commitment you showed today. Thanks to all of our students who came out in bad weather to support your teammates. Oss

3 C’s of Life-Lyndhurst Martial Arts

3 C’s of Life-Lyndhurst Martial Arts

The 3 C’s of life: Choices, Chances and Changes! You must make a choice to take a chance or your life will never change…. Start 2024 the right way! Join our winning team! It you want to change your lifestyle, i promise you that you will be a completely different person in 1 year. Won’t happen overnight but it WILL HAPPEN. Call 201 933-5134 for a free trial class.

Savarese BJJ Academy Lyndhurst- 2023 Martial Arts School of the Year!

Savarese BJJ Academy Lyndhurst- 2023 Martial Arts School of the Year!

Congrats to Savarese BJJ Academy on being named 2023 Martial Arts School of the Year! Anyone who wants to join this winning team, call 201 933-5134 or visit www.njbjj.com for more info
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Savarese BJJ student wins double gold at NY Open

Savarese BJJ student wins double gold at NY Open

Congrats to Thomas Thibodeaux on winning the NY Open today in the Master 4 Purplebelt Medium Heavyweight division. Tom has been a model of perseverance in 2023, Opening the year with a tournament that he wasn’t happy with his performance, got back in the training room and fixed some things and has been doing extremely well in the last tournaments. This was a big GOLD for him, really proud of your performance, attitude and heart

Training your worst skill in BJJ


Training your worst skill in BJJ

Training your worst skill in BJJ is something that must be done more often. What is your worst skill? Every BJJ practitioner, you, me, everybody, has a worst skill. Some part of the game that falls far behind their other skills. We all carry it around as a burden and hope it does not show up in sparring or competition. A great project for allJiu-Jitsu students is to identify the worst element of your game. It can be a move, say for example, the deadly triangle choke or a position, say, weak side bottom half guard. Whatever it is, identify it, then study it. Ask your instructor about it and also study great athletes/competitors who have a reputation for excellence in that area/position. Then set a very manageable goal for yourself. For three weeks, start every sparring session in that position or move and spend basically all of your training times for those 3 weeks in that specific area of technique. Initially you will feel awful and mentally defeated. Don’t get discouraged. Understand this, in learning activities, the greatest jump in skill level occurs every in training and then decreases over time. I promise you that after a rough start you will make astounding progress in that area in a relatively short time. Will you be a world beater? No, but you will be considerably better and put yourself in a position to improve over time. Most importantly, you will not see that area as an area of weakness as longer, but as an area of growth in the future.  one of the biggest things we teach here at Savarese BJJ academy (www.bergencountybjj.com) is ‘in order to succeed, often times we must fail first”.  Once you see it in that light, then you can move forward with that move/position as part of your overall progress, rather than make progress in some areas and just leave that one behind and hope it never gets exposed.

Savarese BJJ student takes bronze at Masters World Championship

Savarese BJJ student takes bronze at Masters World Championship

Congrats to Tom Thibodeaux on taking bronze in his division and the Absolute at the International Masters yesterday in CA. Awesome job Tom! What I’m most proud of is you didn’t like your showing the last time you competed instead of just dwelling on it, you got right back on the horse and did it again. Sometimes a bad day is just that… A bad day. One tournament, one training session, one roll, never defines us. Jiu-Jitsu is a way of life, a lifelong journey of personal betterment. Congrats and I’m really proud of your accomplishment on and off the mat, a physical and mental victory

Winner vs Losers


WINNERS vs LOSERS
The Winner: Is always a part of the answer
The loser: Is always a part of the problem
The Winner: Always has a program
The Loser: Always has an Excuse
The Winner: Says “Let me do it for you”
The Loser: Says “Thats not my job”
The Winner: Sees an answer for every problem
The Loser: Sees a problem in every answer
The Winner: Sees a green near every sand trap
The Loser: Sees two or three sand traps near every green
The Winner: Says “It may be difficult but it’s possible”
The Loser: Says “It may be possible but it’s too difficult”
When a winner makes a mistake, he says, “I was wrong;”
When a loser makes a mistake, he says, “It wasn’t my fault.”
A winner works harder than a loser and has more time;
A loser is always “too busy” to do what is necessary.
A winner goes through a problem:
A loser goes around it, and never gets past it.
A winner makes commitments;
A loser makes promises.
A winner says, “I’m good, but not as good as I ought to be;”
A loser says, “I’m not as bad as a lot of other people.”
A winner listens;
A loser just waits until it’s his turn to talk.
A winner respects those who are superior to him and tries to learn something from them;
A loser resents those who are superior to him and tries to find chinks in their armor.
A winner feels responsible for more than his job;
A loser says, “I only work here.”
A winner says, “There ought to be a better way to do it;”
A loser says, “That’s the way it’s always been done here.

Learning is difficult in beginning of BJJ


Learning is difficult in beginning of BJJ

Learning is difficult in beginning of BJJ. If it wasn’t, you’d already know everything you needed to know. When it comes to new things, Jiu-Jitsu asks you to walk the line between tension and fear. Any time you try to learn something new, whether it’s a total paradigm shift or just adding important details to something that’s already there, it’s easy to get stuck.
What sticks you to the spot isn’t fear of something new or fear of change, even though both of these are charges often levied at the burden of learning. It’s the tension of uncertainty, the competing concerns between “will this work†and “this might not workâ€. It’s the stress of wondering whether if I learn this, will it benefit me…or distract me? In my experience, this tension is the hallmark of a great educational experience. A truly new idea or experience places you on a threshold…where you used to be vs. where you are going. You may sometimes expose yourself to a little tension willingly, but often we hesitate when we have the opportunity to learn something new. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can choose to actively seek out this pressure, the experience of being on the threshold and seeing the next few steps without seeing the whole staircase. When you do, you let what’s new push over you over the edge and out onto the other side. I often tell my students at Savarese BJJ (www.njbjj.com) that if you get by the 1st 6 months of training, you will train forever because you already did the worst part.

Time always catches up in BJJ


Time always catches up in BJJ

Time always catches up in BJJ! Brazilian jiu-jitsu happens in real time, so there are always new decisions to be made. We prefer to make proactive choices wherever we can, but with resistance in the mix, you also have to become comfortable with reactive choices (where you don’t initiate the action but must still work to advance your plan anyway). Proactive or reactive, ‘bad” decisions happen when you’re in a rush and can’t process information fast enough. You miss an important part of the signal and head off in the wrong direction. This happens in guard-passing, when the passer can change directions faster and with greater ease than the guard player and clears the legs as a result. Panic also inhibits good decisions, leading to a freak out and a cascade of emergency choices that are less than optimal. Bad decisions also happen when the effects of your choices aren’t evident right away – you’re swayed by short-term comfort and ignore long-term repercussions. Exploding out of the mount works until it doesn’t. Many bad decisions work out OK in the short run because you can be short-term successful…but time often changes changes this. To work on making better long-term decisions requires elevating the value of the long run. It can be worthwhile to sacrifice immediate gratification, to look closely at the gap you’re covering up and the mistakes you make. With attention, you can start this process where you are and learn do it regardless of how much noise there might be around instant results.