Welcome to the big wide world of Martial Arts and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. How was your first class? You may find that you have a new found interest in such things as ice and tiger balm. In fact, your new found activity may also have elicited thoughts of other things you were until now uninterested in or aware of- ‘Wow, I have a muscle there and it’s sore?’, ‘I wonder how I can improve my cardio so I can roll longer.’, ‘What should I eat before a training session?’
Whatever your questions, you can be sure others have asked them as well. Our coaches got together and thought back to their early days of training to come up with the best advice their white belt selves could have gotten at the beginning of their Jiu Jitsu journeys. In the coming weeks we will be releasing their thoughts in this ongoing article.
“Accept that you are going to be really bad at it when you first start. It has a very difficult learning curve, but the joy and skill you achieve will easily outweigh the initial frustrations.”
-Angus Liu
“Your first job as a white belt is to survive. Once you realize and know in your body that you’re surviving and no one is actually trying to kill or hurt you you can relax out of primal impulses and get down to the real learning and self development of this art.
Listen to as well as act on what your body tells you. Stretch. A lot. And learn to rest.
Don’t wait so long to compete. Face that challenge of stepping onto the competition mats.”
-Ariadne Burkhart
“Never give up. What not kills you makes you stronger. Except the bear; the bear will kill you.”
-Istvan Szasz
“About a year ago a blue belt friend asked me ”if you could go back in time and tell the white belt version of yourself 3 technical things to help accelerate your jiu jitsu progress, what would those things be”. I had some quick answers for him but after giving it a bit of thought I think that my answer would be now much more refined.
1. Never let anyone control your head! I didn’t get told this till I was well into my purple belt so it’s no wonder that my ears are the way they are. As the old wrestling adage goes, where the head goes the body must follow, and so it is with jiu jitsu. If you control someone’s head in side control or half guard or even from mount, the ways they can escape are severely diminished. Not to mention the discomfort of having someone’s shoulder bearing down into your jaw. Sounds easy right! Well this is often much harder than you think!1.Knee to elbow/staying in a ball. You often hear people mention, that you should put your knee to elbow and keep them together. Sounds easy enough, but why are we doing this? I think that a more accurate description of this is that, the area between your arm pit and knee is sacred and it is your job to retain control of that area whilst simultaneously dominating the same are on your opponent. But again why are we doing this? Structurally speaking that’s where all the prime movers of the body are or the core muscles. Quads, hamstrings, glutes, abdominals etc. So if you are controlling your opponents core then u are restricting their movement. If you look at all the best positions in Jiu Jitsu, Mount, Back, Side control. That space is controlled by one person and the other person is trying to regain that control first before they can attack with any high percentage attack. If you are able to stay in a ball and curled up it is harder to get to that space and through the more modern techniques of inverting and rolling back to guard etc. you can remain like a coiled spring and retain and regain your guard. When you lengthen out that space or target area becomes open for your opponent to get to. Again sounds easy in practice but is often much harder to do in real life.
2. Knee to elbow/staying in a ball. You often hear people mention, that you should put your knee to elbow and keep them together. Sounds easy enough, but why are we doing this? I think that a more accurate description of this is that, the area between your arm pit and knee is sacred and it is your job to retain control of that area whilst simultaneously dominating the same are on your opponent. But again why are we doing this? Structurally speaking that’s where all the prime movers of the body are or the core muscles. Quads, hamstrings, glutes, abdominals etc. So if you are controlling your opponents core then u are restricting their movement. If you look at all the best positions in Jiu Jitsu, Mount, Back, Side control. That space is controlled by one person and the other person is trying to regain that control first before they can attack with any high percentage attack. If you are able to stay in a ball and curled up it is harder to get to that space and through the more modern techniques of inverting and rolling back to guard etc. you can remain like a coiled spring and retain and regain your guard. When you lengthen out that space or target area becomes open for your opponent to get to. Again sounds easy in practice but is often much harder to do in real life.
3. Try and learn concepts not moves. Within every technique there is a technical or bio-mechanical reason why the move works. If you can understand the principle, then applying that to other places means that you are no longer restricted to just “the move”. You can redesign the move and apply it to many different places and possitions.”
-Owen Gee Kee
Stay tuned next week for Part II of our article!