Valhalla over at BJJ Vision Quest said some things in a recent post that resonated with me more than I would have liked. The idea of being a “B-/C+” jiu jitsu “student”, a certain ambivalence toward competition … True enough, I’m nowhere near as uprooted as she is, trying to settle into a new situation in the City of Angels after more than a year of traveling and training around the country. But as Sartre might suggest, rootedness is a state of mind as much as it is a sense of place. It’s been a strange winter and I’m hoping that the spring will bring with it a shift in the speed and sort of whirling lights and dancing shadows. I’ve not had a decent training month (i.e., three days a week for three weeks in a row or more) since December, partly due to injuries, partly due to other obligations that unfortunately could only be tended to in the evenings. But that irregular training schedule has really taken its toll. I can almost see the blue in my blue belt getting paler and paler by the week.
I was telling my wife last night that jiu jitsu achievement isn’t something to be measured daily or even weekly. Quarterly is probably as short-term as you want to go. But an off-night or two when you don’t seem to be able to get much of anything accomplished is hard to ignore if you have any ambition, at all. And while I’m not trying to turn myself into a Pan Am regular, I’m not in it just for the fancy pajamas, either.
Val talks about writing down the things she’s grateful for. As you might expect, I roll a bit differently. I’d rather focus on the problems, what it is that is so damn wrong that it’s got me humming along with the chanting nuns on a Thursday morning.
In the OG (as in “Older Grappler”) e-mails I’ve been getting from Paul Greenhill of The Wise Grappler, he makes a point about us OGs focusing on defense and sweeps. His theory is that older, slower grapplers need to “survive” first and foremost, and need to be prepared to be put in a lot of bad situations—particularly by younger, stronger and/or faster opponents. While Greenhill says his advice is fundamentally for OGs, he adds that it is almost completely applicable to smaller grapplers (check), injured grapplers, and most female grapplers.
I’ve thought about that, and have agreed with him. What I need to do is a better job of taking that advice to heart. I think some of my “coding” has helped me keep the different positions, escapes and attacks in mind—something that had been a problem over the past few months. And while I’d like to have a diverse game with all sorts of different moving parts, I need to focus more on what works for me so that I have more success—and, quite frankly, more fun—on the mat.
It’s kind of like a ballplayer suffering through an “o-fer” streak who just needs to see the damn ball go into the basket just once in order to remind himself that there isn’t a lid on the thing, and that he does know how to shoot, and score.
So what am I looking at? I need to focus on my half-guard game, particularly pulling half guard and getting up on the ledge (i.e., coming up on the inside knee). I need to attack with the Old School sweep every chance I get, and to try and understand better the mechanics of the Twist Back.
From the closed guard, it’s all about Crimson—especially since the vast majority of guys I roll with are bigger than I am and difficult for me to break down. I’d like to believe that I could work in the pendulum sweep (code pending), as well, and reviewing the Abhaya instructional on that move was nice. The pendulum seems like it would be a solid compliment to Crimson: one sweep against high posture, one sweep against middle posture. Against a very low posture, right now my best bet seems to be to transition to half guard and work the sweep from there (though I imagine the arm-stuff triangle choke wouldn’t be a bad attack in this situation).
Whatever I do, I can’t wait. Get grips and sweep, sweep, sweep. If you miss and wind up in a bad position, protect yourself immediately, take a moment to see exactly where you are and where you want to go, and then get the hell out of there. My favorite jiu jitsu quote these days is the one from Marcelo Garcia that I call “Go.” It reminds me that everything is an attack—or should be. Whether you are attempting a submission, an escape, a sweep, or a transition from one top position to another, your mentality should always be one of attacking. “You shouldn’t be defending all the time,” Marcelo says. And it’s a great point that I have yet to take into account. This, of course, doesn’t mean going off like a spazz or rolling at 110% every time you hit the mat. What it means is that you should be fundamentally concerned about what you are doing—not what you are doing IN RESPONSE to what the other guy is doing.
Randy Couture made a similar point during his tenure as a coach in the first season of The Ultimate Fighter. I think he was talking with Josh Rafferty who, quite frankly, seemed petrified about his upcoming fight. Rafferty was going on and on about his opponent’s style and skill set until Randy interrupted him, gently, by saying “You can’t worry about what he is going to do in the cage. You’ve got to focus on what you are going to do in the cage.”
Wise words from two of the best in the business.
