George Patton, Helio Gracie, and the Depletion Principle

One of my favorite lines from the movie Patton is this:

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

I remembered this bit after reading a recent email from Ryron Gracie, who was pitching his Gracie University 32 Principles program. I haven't bought the program. But I thought this excerpt from Ryron was worth noting - especially as I get closer to Mat Return (TM) next month.

When I was growing up, I remember my grandfather telling me, “I’d rather you make a mistake and get submitted, than roll so hard that you can’t continue.”

What I took from this was that I was to never defeat myself.

No matter how badly I want to submit someone, sometimes I must slow down because if I continue at the pace I am at, I run the greatest risk of all: complete exhaustion.

The reason complete exhaustion is worse than being submitted is because submission is generally due to a simple technical error. However, when you reach complete exhaustion, it is a psychological/mindset error.

We should never reach the level of vulnerability that exists when you are so tired that you are begging your training partner to get off you, unable to continue rolling, or the worst, when you can’t stand up because you’re so exhausted.

It’s okay to train hard, but be very careful not to defeat yourself.

The desire to avoid inferior positions and the desire to submit your training partner may lead you to defeat. Learn how to pace yourself because the ability to outlast your opponent is a great technique in itself.

If you ever had the chance to ask the Grandmaster how he defeated all those giants, he would have said, “I never defeated my opponents, they defeated themselves.”

King Conor: Freeing the Body

I've been loving The Notorious series spotlighting the rise of Irish featherweight mixed martial artist, Conor McGregor. I can't wait for his upcoming match against champion, Jose Aldo from Brazil. 

I especially appreciated his remarks on the body and movement in episode five. As much as cynicism bores me, I'll admit that I was surprised at how Rickson-esque and Ginastica Natural-like some of his movements and comments were - so much so that I couldn't help but share my rough transcription of them here. 

"You're almost going to trick the mind to do stuff that it's not used to. 

What's happening there is that the brain is working more than the body - your brain is outworking the body, there's no stopping you. 

People work the body over than the brain. And that's where the skill level stagnates or it declines. 

In the fight there is no pattern. It's just a blank canvas. You go out and just let the instinct take over. Let it just click. 

Prizefighting is short. Get in, get rich, get out. But martial arts is a way of life. It's for life. 

It's about movement. It's not about resistance. You should be going in there fluid. I feel like I'm understanding this game a lot more. It's not about coming in and getting the rounds in like it was.  

It's a 24/7 process to free the body. That's what I'm ultimately trying to do. I'm trying to become free. I'm trying to open up my body in all ways. 

I have a routine. I wake up. I drink water. I stretch. I shake it out. 

That's me beginning to free my body again after whatever amount of time I've been asleep. 

People just usually jump up get out of bed straightway, go and brush their teeth, eat their fill, rush to whatever they have to go, do what they have to do and their body is just locking up, getting tighter and tighter and tighter until it just locks or cracks. 

I don't see it as showing up and doing jiu-jitsu, showing up and doing boxing, showing up and doing Tae Kwon Do. I just see it as moving. Waking up. Freeing the body. Becoming more loose. And moving."

"To Give the Weak Ones a Chance"

"The Jiu-Jitsu that I created was designed to give the weak ones a chance to face the heavy and strong."

Helio Gracie

A l w a y s.  T r a i n.  M o n d a y s.

Que es Mas Macho?

The number of black belts you defeat or the number of white belts you teach?

Werdum: What a Jiu-Jitsu Fighter Must Do Well in MMA

There's a reason why fundamentals are fundamental. Awhile back, Demian Maia talked about how his jiu-jitsu self-defense training helped his preparation for mixed martial arts. Now The Man Who Submitted Fedor has a similar thought when it comes to the basics of grappling in MMA:

If we go to the ground and I need to use my guard, I don't foresee any problems. I see when fighters lack confidence in the guard and want to stand up fast, giving their back to the opponent. The technical get-up is one of the first things we learn in jiu-jitsu, and we have to do it well in MMA. This is important. If there's no way to do it, use the guard, sweep, try a submission.

On Kron

There is one thing more impressive to me than Kron Gracie's run of four submission victories in this year's ADCC.

The fact that there isn't a single leglock among them.

My sentiments toward leg locks are no secret. And your mileage may vary - especially when it comes to no gi competition. But peer beyond Kron's immaculate quartet and, to steal a line, it's heel hooks all the way down. 

As much as I respect the performances of Galvao, Cobrinha, Romulo and old warriors like Sperry and Gurgel whose age approximates my own, Cyborg's upset victory over Buchecha in the Absolute ... it is easy to find inspiration in Kron Gracie's performances in China this weekend. His jiu-jitsu is a kind of solution.

" ...of course the techniques are great – but the sensibility of the opponent, the sense of touch, the weight, the momentum, the transition from one move to another ..."

Rickson: Striking is a 50/50 Bet

Since I'm on my horse (or at least, back in the stable), let me add that I think that Rickson had a great point when he said that the problem with striking as a strategy was that it was a "50-50 game."

As you might imagine, Master Hickson continues to catch all kinds of hell for this remark in ye olde MMA forums. And while a number of folks have embarked upon some major counter-argumentation on behalf of the non-randomness of victory in the striking arts, plenty others remain just plain pissed off that Mr. 400-0* was unimpressed by probabilities that made pugilism more sport than self-defense.

But I when I think of knockouts like Rashad Evans over Chuck Liddell, or Rampage's Third Time Charm against The Axe Murderer, I can't help but think that Rickson had a point. Sure, there was Matt Hughes' armbar off of GSP's failed kimura from bottom half guard in their first match up. And we all remember the 24-hour fever over the "Von Flue Choke" (reminder: avoid trying to guillotine from the bottom when in side control).

Still simultaneous submissions, moments in which two potentially finishing attacks are deployed at the same time, couldn't be rarer relative to those photogenic moments we know and love as fight fans when two sluggers have moved from locked and loaded to near-full extension with their heaviest haymakers en route ...

Frank Mir Was Right

Here's another reason why, when it comes to MMA, I've always been a Frank Mir fan.

"He went up against a really good submission guy.  And he got caught. So it wasn't like he got knocked out or he got dominated, you know, through the whole fight."

--Dana White, talking about a replacement fighter for his reality series, The Ultimate Fighter.

"When a Week of Rain is a Year"

One of my favorite lines from Roethke is a great way to describe being off the mats for even a short period of time.

My latest challenge have been these meio-pesado blue belts.  What they've been exposing is the downside of my relatively static half-guard game.  My initial reaction had been to try and develop a more dynamic half guard, moving more toward a deep half game, for example.  But I'm having second thoughts, for most of the obvious reasons.

There was a line in a recent retrospective on Terere that caught me.  It suggested that Terere felt claustrophobic when playing from the bottom.  And because of this, he focused on having an exceptional top game.

This reminded me that one of the more important things for a black belt to do is to carve out his or her jiu-jitsu out of the whole stone.  You are what you is, to steal a line from Zappa, and you're better off figuring out how to make that work rather than wasting your time wondering what life would be like if you were someone else with someone else's game.

Everyone is different.  There's a lot of jiu-jitsu out there.  Some of it, arguably most of it, is ultimately there just to keep you from being ignorant.  The rest, on the other hand, is all yours - if you'll have it.

There were a "few tricks with a knife I used to do" - to continue my lyrical larceny - when it comes to having the kind of game that will accentuate my positives.  2013 will be largely about trying bring that back.

162.4 on the mat post-train.  Another back-loaded training week with four sessions scheduled between tonight and Saturday, including the Masters class Friday night.  I'm looking forward to being lighter.

"Nor do the wind the sun or the rain"

"... burn and rage at close of day ..."

There's a lot of talk about "champion-ness" when it comes to jiu-jitsu.  And, for the record, God love the champion.

But for some of us, jiu-jitsu is simply the warmth of a roaring fireplace in wintertime, a healing chaos in the middle of the orderly decay.

100% Marcelo

Meanwhile, on the other side of the jiu-jitsu spectrum, there's this

Marcelo's 100% Training Philosophy

The caption for this video, while worth reading, is a little misleading.  The point isn't just that Marcelo devotes 100% of his training to jiu-jitsu rather than dividing his time with specific strength and conditioning workouts.  More importantly, Marcelo is showing those who choose this path just how intensely they need to train - regardless of the skill level of their training partner - in order to make the "jiu-jitsu, si / conditioning, no" approach work in the real world.

I think this is especially relevant for those who want to be active in competition jiu-jitsu ("sport" jiu-jitsu is starting to become an epithet), but don't - or can't - devote time to separate strength and conditioning sessions.  There has to be a place for competition-style intensity if you aren't going to be doing off-mat conditioning and Marcelo's short video shows how it's done.

We Get Letters

Mudbone and BJJ Math

One of Richard Pryor's classic characters, Mudbone, had a line that went something like: "Somebody ask me, well, Mudbone when's the last time you got some?  I told 'em, 'Yesterday.'  Cause that's as far back as I want to have to remember it."

I feel the same way about training jiu-jitsu.  Maybe my answer to "when's the last time you trained?" will never consistently be "yesterday."  But if there are 365 days in a year, then training at least 15 times a month, at least 180 times a year, means you're on the mat virtually every other day.  And over the course of a year, year after year, that's a pretty mean pace.

The State of Small Man Jiu-Jitsu

Reality check from Dan Faggella of MicroBJJ

However, as we've seen, there's a big trend in this
direction for the small man BJJ competition game, 
and generally nobody wants top because you're 
over 4 times more likely to be swept than to pass.

(You can read that and pretend its not a big deal
if you want)

and what he calls "Dan's 'One Day This Will Be Famous' Quote":

Neither player wants to take top positions unless it
means he's going to end up on the back or in side
control, so neither player chooses to leave their hip,
and instead fight for very difficult transitions and
otherwise occupy themselves with random leg-lock
orientations.

 There are a lot of ways of dealing with this if you are part of the under-160 (or, as I like to think of us, the "pound for pound" crowd).  At first I was reluctant to admit that this was the reality of small man jiu-jitsu.  As some one is under 160, but has a very big man jiu-jitsu game based on top control, mount rather than back, and a relatively static approach to transition and attack (more phalanx than Blitzkrieg), I had invested years in a style that had served me well enough.  It was heavy, and it was mine, brother.

But over the past year or so of training against bigger and better challenges, a lot of what brought me here isn't keeping me here.  And no where is this more apparent than in the guard, where length and size have made my customary options incomplete.
I'm not about to start playing the dueling squid game that has made so much under-160 jiu-jitsu almost unwatchable at the highest levels.  But I do need to adopt a more kinetic guard, if only to better deal with the challenges that are increasingly commonplace.  And the source of that kinetic energy has got to come from more dynamic leg work, the kind I'm seeing out of the de la Riva and Reverse de la Riva (both outside and inside grips) guards.  

These "half guards" which similarly focus on isolating one side of the passer are probably what I can benefit most from the contemporary small man jiu-jitsu game.   And even if the de la Riva complex is mostly used as a set-up for the berimbolo - a great transition I'm nonetheless ambivalent about learning - there are still aspects of the position that may help revitalize my work from the bottom.

T-Rex

Winning and Losing

Caio: Rafa = P4P Best

Caio Terra: “Rafael Mendes is Jiu-Jitsu’s number one pound for pound”

“To me Rafael Mendes would also win the absolute at the Pan, if he’d competed in it. I’d put money on him,” he told friends shortly after Rafa Mendes grabbed Rubens Cobrinha’s arm and coaxed a tapout in the featherweight final.

“I have no doubt in my mind that he’s the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world right now. I don’t think anyone doubts that anymore, especially with the superiority he showed at this Pan,” said Caio in conclusion.

QFT

Back to Basics (Again)

At the black belt level, the learning process starts over again. If a new black belt is honest with him or herself, they realize they know very little about their chosen art.

--Roy Harris, Progression in Jiu-Jitsu