Pick Your Poison: Endless Leglocks or Lapel Entanglement

Scylla or Charybdis? A no gi universe dominated by leg locks or a gi world defined by lapel entanglement?

Get Down Get Down

Almost a year ago this time I had a real jiu-jitsu moment of transcendence reading about Renzo Gracie black belt John Danaher. I've spent some of my more constructive time during the COVID-19 pandemic watching his back control/attack series, and am just now looking into his upcoming takedown instructional.

One thing I'm very heartened by is his embrace of the ankle pick, a takedown I've long been a fan of. Same thing with the collar drag, though a fear of getting eye-poked has made me more wary of that takedown than I'd like to be. Fundamentally, it is a great opportunity to understand Danaher's thinking in terms of what works FOR JIU-JITSU, rather than as a generic takedown in a given sport. I always feel that the process that Danaher shares is more than half the value of the instruction he provides.

How to Be a Jiu-Jitsu Phenom

I've now heard two of the most successful American-based jiu-jitsu coaches - Lloyd Irvin and John Danaher - spell it out. Here's Danaher on Joe Rogan's podcast.

... my students could put opponents who trained much much longer than they had into a niche area which my students has so much knowledge of, so much training in that isolated niche domain, that they could take someone who had trained three, four times longer than themselves and have more knowledge in that one domain than their much more experienced opponent did. 

Happy Fifteenth!

Today marks 15 years as a student of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. 

To say that this is not the way I would have expected to celebrate a decade and a half in jiu-jitsu is a massive understatement. But here we are: with a global pandemic that has gyms only partially open and even then only for those with the nerve to risk infection by joining their fellow potential virus-carriers indoors. 

Combining my knee injury - coming up on the first anniversary of that if I remember correctly - with this lockdown, I've trained jiu-jitsu approximately 12 times since September 1, 2019. Ordinarily, including the lockdown, I would have notched 39 sessions; September - February is business travel season for me (or "was"). In terms of sparring minutes, which is how I want to track training once I am able to get back on the mat, I got in a total of 208 minutes over that September 2019 - present time frame. Ideally, that would have been more than 675 minutes.

To think back in March at how willing I was to sacrifice the summer if only we could be back to something approaching normality by now! Hard not to feel more than a little annoyance at those who have made this circumstance harder, rather than easier, with their immaturity, willful ignorance, and selfishness. 

I'd hoped to be back on the mat in time to celebrate my 15th anniversary in jiu-jitsu. Now, I feel like it's going to be longer, maybe much longer, and there's not a lot to celebrate in that.