Monthly Archives: June 2012

Extra Fat and Happy

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I’ve been eating a lot, working a lot, enjoying life.

The food is healthy (veggies, lean meat, some fruit) but the quantity is what I’m not limiting.  I want to give myself a breather, before diving back into it for the fall.

Before I finish writing this status update, let me go grab a random snack. Why? Because I can! That’s a damn good feeling. Oh and I’ll be competing in the local tournaments in the extra fat divisions. No real cutting until September.

The problem with the “diet” I was on before is that I never quite followed it seriously enough. When I competed at Worlds, my carelessness with food resulted in me being 2 lbs overweight. I ran it off in just 10 minutes and that served as a good warm up, but still this was supposed to be my fat division (middleweight, ~177 lbs). A “fat” division is one I should be able to make without cutting at all or even thinking of cutting.

Competition is stressful, and my goal for this year is to reduce that stress as much as possible. I want to not have to think about any tournaments (except the really big ones) until the day of the event. A strict diet plan leading up to each competition is part of that. While I’ve been very systematic about learning jiu jitsu. I’ve been a complete white belt meathead about learning dieting, and dieting is the thing that breaks many competitors who have demanding jobs (and/or other responsibilities) outside the sport.

Another random rant comes to a close. PS: I had beer with my coach yesterday while watching judo. We should make that a regular thing.

Brazilian Judo

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Guess what country has the most active judo players? You’ll probably guess China or Russia or France, but you’d be wrong. It’s Brazil. Yes, the country that gave birth to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is also the country that is training the most judoka in the world.

In 2012, Brazil’s olympic judo team has a qualified athlete (both male and female) in every weight category. That’s a rare, and a sign that their squad runs deep. The Brazilian women in particular have been dominating on the world stage, and are definite medal hopefuls for both the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. Just see them dominate in Moscow this month:

I think the popularity of judo in Brazil is facinating. I still think that judo and jiu jitsu are kept seperate in most academies in the world. But when BJJ grows enough to be respected all over the world, the scary day will come when an Olympic judoka will also be competing at the Worlds. And by “scary”, I mean “exciting”.

I hope that jiu jitsu rules will eventually be adjusted to penalize the guard pull (even if just with an advantage) and encourage the grapplers to go at it on their feet. If you watch the video above, that results in some big throws, and a more exciting sport for the spectators.

Don’t Count the Seconds

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This is probably old news to collegiate wrestling fans but I just saw the 2009 NCAA finals in the 149 lbs division between two undefeated wrestlers: Brent Metcalf and Darrion Caldwell. Metcalf is one of the latest in the long line of athletes that perfectly represented the Iowa Wrestling mindset.

Caldwell came out with an incredible (and to me, heartbreaking) performance to beat Metcalf. The match is worth watching all the way through:

Metcalf is an inspiration. He didn’t ever give up pushing forward, working for the takedown. And what was especially representative of that is the moment when Caldwell began celebrating early by doing a flip, Metcalf came at him anyway. Here’s a slow motion video of that exchange:

This was controversial at the time, and many people criticized both athletes. To me, I can’t help but draw inspiration and ultimate respect for Metcalf’s passion and determination.

In my own experience, I can tell a lot about where I am mentally from how I act during the last few seconds of a tough match or a cardio session. You have to push through and past the end with the kind of mindset that says you can go another minute or however long you need to. I know I’m mentally defeated if I’m counting seconds to the end.

Clearly, Metcalf was not counting seconds.

Is Mat Time Always Better Than Strength and Conditioning?

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Training, diet, lifestyle, it’s all a damn mystery. Every decade a new commonly-accepted wisdom comes out. The only thing I’m fairly certain of is that you need water and sleep, and even that seems to be optional for the tougher specimens of our species (aka collegiate wrestlers).

Anyway, I read an interview recently with someone big (I think Fabio Gurgel) where he said that strength and conditioning is never better than mat time (drilling, positional sparring, competition training). However, he continued to make the argument that you still should do strength and conditioning to prevent burning out mentally.

I like that philosophy. Strength and conditioning is the thing you do to spice up your relationship with jiu jitsu. At the end of the day, technique will conquer all, and you won’t learn technique running on a treadmill. But we are not robots, and can’t do the hard boring thing every time. We need to do the fun things as well.

Epilogue: Have you ever written something full of contradictions, and at the end you are not sure you agree with any of it? Well that’s what this blog post is for me. But I think the internal conflict I have on the subject represents something: the fact that it’s not easy to design the perfect training regimen under the constraints of real life and real mind.

Do What No One Else is Doing

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It’s a common belief in sports, and certainly in jiu jitsu, that there are no “shortcuts” to getting good. You “have to put in the hard work”. While in an abstract sense this is true, I think it misses the point of what it takes to get good faster than the guys you are competing against.

You have to do something that they are not doing, and that something has to be the thing that makes you win.

Too many people try to duplicate the training regimens of the top guys and just work their ass off at repeating that regimen day after day. I believe in the power of innovation. I ask myself the question every day: “What could I be doing differently that works better for my physical and mental strengths?” And it’s important that I’m always prepared to throw away the hard work of the last several months and try a different direction.

I believe my strength is the ability to repeat the same activity over and over for hundreds of times every day without exception, no matter how “boring” it is. I have to use that strength to my advantage.

I began a new set of drills at home that I believe will make me much more dangerous and effective in competition. It’s really tough to motivate myself to do them every day, but I’m going to stick with it. When it comes to training, and many things in life, I’ve learned that if I dread doing something, it’s probably a thing I should be doing more of.

“There’s No Wrong Way In Jiu Jitsu”

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As usual I must type out a bunch of tangential soliloquy before I get to the point of the blog post. Bear with me.

Given my recent work load, my “training” has included a lot of watching of jiu jitsu and judo instructionals and competition footage.

I talk about drilling a lot, but I should also mention that watching instructionals is a really effective way of improving your game. It depends on your personality of course. It works for me. A good instructor sets you on the right path and fixes critical mistakes, but exploring the intricacies of techniques is often something you have to do on your own. That where instructionals come in. I don’t just watch random stuff. I focus on specific positions.

One of my favorite takes on passing the closed guard, for example, is from the online instructional of Roberto “Cyborg” Abreu. I’m a member of his new online training academy at BJJWorldChampion.com. There’s about 15 videos on passing the closed guard alone. I could spend several months just working on those. He basically shows the good solid fundamentals of the like you might find in Saulo Ribeiro’s classic instructional. But he adds a few interesting details to each technique which makes me think about the position in a whole new way. I now know how to take the back off of the stack pass ;-)

Now the title of the post is a quote of Cyborg in one of those videos that grabbed my attention. He introduced the technique as just one way of doing it, and that there is no right or wrong way in jiu jitsu. You have to find the variation that works well for your physical and mental attributes. Cyborg’s basic justification for a technique is two fold:

  1. This has worked for me against the best people in the world in competition.
  2. I think it may work for you as well for the following reasons…

Frankly, it’s refreshing to hear that, because too many instructionals claim their way of doing a technique as THE way. I understand why they do it. Because while there is “no wrong way in jiu jitsu”, there are lots of ways that are most likely going to be wrong for most people. But the cost of that is it discourages exploration and understanding what makes the technique work.

 

The Early Days of MMA

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“In the beginning I was out there fighting on pure instincts, but when they took away headbutts, I had to learn a lot of other skills.”
- Mark Coleman (from the documentary “Smashing Machine”)

It’s hard to believe it but it’s been 19 years since Royce Gracie, the skinny Brazilian in white pijamas, stepped into the cage at UFC 1 and brought the art of jiu jitsu to the attention of the American public. It seems this one event sparked a passion in the minds of many extraordinary athletes that are now high level accomplished BJJ black belts. From reading and listening to interviews, many of them started the same way with a naive optimism: “Hey, that looks easy enough, I can do that.” And with those words began their journey. Many of them quit, but enough stuck with it that BJJ has now infiltrated most corners of the United States.

Lots of BJJ practitioners romanticize those early years of MMA, because (they argue) jiu jitsu at that time was more practical and “pure”. It was more about “self-defense”, or how to defend against, control, and submit your opponent. Royce Gracie exemplified that idea in the early UFCs.

As the sport of BJJ evolved, point-based tournaments emerged and the human chess aspect of jiu jitsu captured the attention and focus of many BJJ academies. Just like in judo, the question of applicability of a technique in a street fight became rarer in the acadamy. Sure “modern” jiu jitsu is still a combat art, but among many practitioners, the focus has shifted to jiu jitsu solely for the sake of jiu jitsu.

I’m a fan and practitioner of sport jiu jitsu and sport judo. I compete often, and I enjoy it for its own sake. When I’m competing, I don’t think “I wonder if this x-guard will be an effective technique in a bar fight scenario.” That said, I enjoyed and miss the time when MMA was less a sport, and more of a brawl. Athletes were not well-rounded, or especially prepared for everything they were to face. It was much more like a street fight, a battle of wills amidst a chaos of punches, kicks, takedowns, and highly unpolished submission attempts.

The above thoughts were brought on by watching a documentary on Mark Kerr. He is the big-hearted brawler, opposite in style and spirit from the elite technicians of today (e.g. Anderson Silva). It made me miss those days, when MMA seemed like an unexplored landscape, and so the fighters were truly stepping into the unknown. It was a battle not a sport, and in that way seemed more pure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HRrEkKidi8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2sP6jQZ1co

Mendes Brothers on Drilling

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I’m always interested in seeing how and how much top level guys drill. After all, white belts and blue belts see the value of drilling because there’s a lot of people in the gym that kick their butt on a regular basis. That forces them to ask: “How can I get better?” And usually the answer is: “drilling”.  But for brown and black belts, the motivation is not as obvious.

I think after several thousands reps on a technique, it’s very easy to say: “I think I pretty much got it down” and get very lazy about drilling it. So it’s good to see Mendes brothers talk about how much they drill and how much of that drilling is their A game.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview on their facebook page:

Drilling Sessions: We train 80% our game “A”, drilling our best positions and variations from there. The other 20% we train different positions that is not from our game or new techniques.

Sparring: Our training is about 50% drilling and 50% sparring. the last 2 months before big tournaments we spar more than drill. We always say in the training that Galvao is “drill to win” and we are “roll to win” Lol. But we know how important drilling is.

There you have it, from their mouths to God’s ears. Drill to win.

Change the Mentality Not the Rules

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I heard an interview with Saulo Ribeiro on the Inside BJJ podcast and Saulo got me thinking…

The interviewers asked him if he thinks that the submission-only rules of the upcoming Gracie Worlds tournament will help prevent overly cautious point-centric jiu-jitsu that has been widely observed in recent IBJJF tournaments. People want to win, and sometimes that means not taking any risks.

Saulo didn’t think so. He believes that changing the rules will not ultimately solve the problem. If black belts want to, they will find strategies to play the rules for minimizing risk, while still getting the W in the end. What he believes can solve the problem is changing the mentality of the competitors and the academies where they train. The eternal optimist, Saulo believes in the warrior ideal, and if only everyone can embrace it, then tournaments will have more exciting battles that end in submissions.

The idea is simple. Disgrace the person who wins by an advantage and honor the person who wins via submission. I know that this idea is embraced widely in the BJJ community. However, months after the tournament, when the fighting is all done and almost forgotten, it’s the competitor who walked away with the gold that gets the public recognition. Too often, the brave risk-takers that didn’t quite make it are quickly forgotten. The pragmatic incentive of going for the submission are not there.

So what Saulo explains is near and dear to my heart, and it’s the way I strive to train and compete, but it’s also an ideal that perhaps cannot come to be in a tournament scene where winning is everything, and the competition is tougher and cleverer than ever.

Sizes of IBJJF Tournaments: Guide to Choosing Your Next Tournament

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Having just competed at Worlds in a division of 126 guys, I started to look ahead at what and when the next “big” IBJJF tournament is. I looked at Boston, Chicago, etc, and quickly realized that they are an order of magnitude smaller than the Mundials. So I decided to measure the relative size of the major IBJJF tournaments I’m aware of by what size the blue belt middleweight division was in 2011 for that tournament. This is usually one of the biggest (and often the biggest) division of the tournament. So I figured that it would serve as a decent measuring stick.

When considering whether to do a tournament, I’ll often just look at the next one, and decide based on how I’m feeling. But after doing the little research I mentioned above, it’s clear that it’s smarter to plan ahead to make sure that the division is big enough to justify the costs of travel.

So here’s the results. Below are the major IBJJF tournaments and in parentheses is the number of people that competed in the blue belt middleweight division for that tournament.

International
Worlds (104)
Pans (82)
Europeans (57)
Brasileiros (47)

No-Gi
No-Gi Pans (49)
No-Gi Worlds (38)

Regional
New York (37)
American Nationals (19)
Miami (18)
Houston (18)
London (16)
Las Vegas (15)
Asian Open (14)
Dallas (13)
Chicago Winter (13)
Chicago Summer(11)
Montreal (11)
Phoenix (11)
Boston (2)

From the above “results”, I draw several conclusions:

  1. I will not be going to Boston this year, lol. Come on, Bostonians, get your s*** together!
  2. The regional tournaments I’m considering are Miami in the fall, New York in the spring, and maybe American Nationals (since it’s both gi and no-gi and is pretty well attended).
  3. Since I have friends in Chicago, and the regional tournaments there are of a good size, it’s worth it to make a trip there.
  4. The two major IBJJF no-gi tournaments, while young, are really holding their own in terms of attendance. Just goes to show that the label of “World Champion” is worth a lot to people no matter how you look at it.
  5. All these tournaments are growing by leaps and bounds. Just in 2012 most of these tournaments had an extra 20+% of competitors in this division. The future of BJJ tournaments looks pretty damn good.
  6. And the biggest conclusion of all… the biggest and toughest tournaments are the Pans and the Worlds. If you go anywhere, go to those.

So here is my new strategy for choosing jiu jitsu tournaments to attend:

  • Do as many as I want that are within 2-3 hours driving distance.
  • Travel far only for Pans and Worlds, unless there is a good reason.
  • Do the closest World Pro trial (usually one in New York, or worst-case, Montreal).