Staying calm in BJJ

Staying calm in BJJ

Staying calm in BJJ is an absolute must in order to escape. In a crises situation, everything begins with a calm mind. There is a huge amount physical stress associated with bad/inferior positions in Jiu-Jitsu. If your opponent knows what they are doing, they can make your life thoroughly miserable with cross faces, chest to chest pressure, forcing you into contorted positions etc. It’s very natural for that physical pressure to create mental pressure, where you feel stress to a point where you start to lose effective decision making capability. This creates a vicious spiral where additional mental stress shuts down your ability to plan escapes, resulting in worsening physical stress, which creates still more mental stress, which adds additional physical stress. Learning to maintain a calm mind under intense physical pressure will enable you to see what needs to be done and make decisions to get you out of there. The only real way to develop calmness of mind under pressure is to experience that pressure often enough to adapt to it. Here, our Savarese BJJ Academy (www.njbjj.com) student Pops, all 70+ years old of him, works on his mental game as much as his physical game by absorbing the powerful cross face pressure of his opponent, and stays calm to think his escape of the position. Only the calm mind can make the correct calculations, and that ability to observe accurately what’s happening and calculate what’s needed to turn things in your favor is what will make the difference in your sport performance when things are not going your way.