11 BJJ Insights from 30+ Years: Expert Tips (17-Min)

So we're talking about being the best white belt in class. If you beat everybody in your cohort, your belt level, your gym, but you don't understand why you're just stronger and faster, nobody's really going to appreciate that. If someone asks you, hey, how did you choke me out with a bread cutter choke three times in a row? And then you can say, oh, it's because I got the pinky finger here instead of there.

Oh, nice. When you have this dynamic, you might be beating someone now, but if you can help them because you understand you learned from mistakes and then you're teaching someone, they're going to teach you a week later or a year later, they're going to teach you. So if you think losing is fun, your friends are going to start adopting that same mentality and people are going to want to roll with you and help you. Number three, train it, test it, pendulum.

Okay, train it, test it, pendulum. Yeah. So you're drilling something and then don't believe too much in it. Really test it.

You have to believe it enough for it to give it an honest shot, but then you test it and then you train it. And this might seem obvious, but you don't want to take someone's word for it and say that this is a technique that is, it just works and then you believe it and then when you go test it, it doesn't really work. So to realize that this train test, train test, train test, train test, train test, train test. Number three, take nobody's word for it.

So this is the very dual because you don't want to assume that someone is completely correct because things will not work immediately. Even if I tell you what the best leg lock is today from half guard, it might still take a year or two before it actually clicks. And on the other hand, don't dismiss it too soon. So you have either you have over belief in something or you're dismissing something because you don't believe in it.

And both of these extremes, it's difficult to know where you are. Like should I distrust this person because I don't think they have enough credibility because they didn't win enough competitions? Are they or are they actually on track of something that not many people talk about? Just because I didn't hear Danaher say it doesn't mean that it's not helpful and it's very good.

More people than Danaher can come up with good ways of expressing something and like good ideas. So figuring out where to where to gauge if I should commit more to this or if I should in it. It's not easy at all. But the But just knowing about this this type of problem, I don't know how to say it, but it's really valuable.

Basically, you drill something and you test it in sparring. You train it, you test it, you train it, you test it. And it's theory versus application. Anyways, number four, there is always a way in.

How many times have I said this guy's guard is completely unpassable and it goes together with the first one. There is always a way out and there is always a way in. Doesn't matter how flexible his legs is. If I just keep doing the same kind of strategy, even if I got tapped 10 times, I'm going to figure out a way to break that hook, make it tired and make him make a mistake so that I can either pass or he's going to do something else and I get a submission or a backtake.

There is always, always a way in. Number five, your ego is not your amigo. How many times have I got hurt because I wanted to pay back when I should just have relaxed. Didn't tap in time.

Someone wanted to spar with me. I should have said no. The ego is an opponent that is much worse than any opponent that can stand in front of me. If your opponent, if your training partner is not smiling after the roll, you didn't roll correctly.

This one took me a long time to realize. Just lately I had a guy said that if you do that again, I'm going to stab you in the throat. I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. I just put the knee on your knee on your clavicle and I didn't even push down, but he was not smiling after the roll.

So I didn't do the roll right. I should have figured out what, you know, tune in with a guy and see. He probably looked pissed way before I put my knee on his clavicle. He assumed that I wanted to break his clavicle.

I think it was the ribs or the clavicle. He assumed that I wanted to break his ribs. So I must have done many things incorrectly in order to get that reaction. After a roll, you want your training partner to smile.

Otherwise you didn't do it right. Number seven, don't have one teacher for everything. Just because your coach is your coach in this gym doesn't mean that you have to learn everything from them, especially not diet and losing weight and life advice in general. They might do that completely wrong and just give you what they heard on YouTube.

So ask passers about passing and ask women about pressure because they had to learn all the details like Leticia Ribeiro. She's a, you know, she's four pounds or something. I don't know how she said like a tiny, tiny vixen. So when she shows me how to do pressure passing, I'm going to listen.

I don't listen to the 250 pound guy because he doesn't understand pressure. He just understands how to be heavy because he's heavy. So ask the small women about this stuff that they really have to learn. And women generally have a better understanding of Jiu Jitsu because they can never, ever rely on strength when they're going with bigger guys.

And find people with your proportions. Marcel Garcia and Humle Behal have very different proportions. They can both do triangles, but what they're going to teach you about X-Guard or triangles or Spider Guard are going to be vastly different because one has hobbit legs and the other guy has like Balrog legs. So find people that are, I'm talking about why you shouldn't have one teacher for everything.

And ask coach what he thinks you should prioritize. So the coach can help you because he sees you spar more frequently than anybody else. So ask your coach what you should prioritize, but don't ask him for the solutions for every problem. You can either find it yourself, find it online.

So use your coach for what he thinks your weak spots are. Number eight, write it down. Be scientific. Put it in the words and read your old notes.

Focus on the questions. Yes. Write down questions. The brain works like this.

If I ask you a question now and you don't answer it immediately, you're going to remember that question forever. If I ask myself, why really does the clock go forwards? Why is the clock going this way and not that way? And if I don't know the answer, that question is going to pop up in my mind again and again.

So if you write down or scientific about your problems in Jiu-Jitsu, write down the questions. Why does my guard pass not work against Philip? You don't need to remember it. If you read the notes, it's going to be really helpful, especially old notes.

If you have your notes from two or three or five or 10 years ago, those are going to be incredibly valuable. Just like a family photograph from 30 years ago, that family is never going to be the same 30 years later. So it's going to be like a snapshot in time. Like old photographs have a lot of value and old notes, especially old questions, have a lot of value.

And when you write things down, you're scientific. You don't leave it up to emotions or the daily whatever happens today. As soon as it's written down, it's on a different level of commitment. On that note, number nine is film it.

Every fight in every tournament, get it filmed. Prioritize it. It's so easy with smartphones. And if you have a smartphone and you want to film your fight, make sure that the one who films is good or put it on a tripod in really high resolution so that you can crop it because you don't want to see your fight when you're this small on the screen.

You want it to be good resolution. And it's very important to film your fights because your grandchildren, your children and yourself are going to love to see that fight, especially if you lose because your kids in the future or your students in the future will love to see that you had instead of just assuming that you were always that good. Here are 200 fights that I actually lost in 4K resolution. Have a look.

And learning from the mistakes in those fights is going to be your most valuable lesson. Always, always film up close and in good quality. And when you watch it, write down. When you're watching, write it down in a Google Doc or on a paper and send your videos to friends for feedback and ask for honest feedback.

Like, of course, you just want to show off everything that you did well, but also ask for feedback. And when the fights are older, when you didn't see the fight for several years, then you can start looking at it again. And you kind of forgot the situation and then you can start seeing the fight from your opponent's perspective. That's almost impossible to do when the fight is brand fresh.

But to see the fight from the other person's perspective, from your opponent's perspective, is incredibly valuable. And of course, edit out the really boring bits. So if you were just stuck in half guard for four minutes and you can't even see the details, just cut it out so that it's more enjoyable to watch. And also, yeah, especially know like, look how annoying it is to watch this when it's shaking.

Buy a gimbal, it's like 100 bucks or less, or a tripod, which is even more cheap. And the person who is filming, give them a selfie stick at least so that they can get up and not have people come in front of them. And if you have, even better, if you have a couple of guys filming so that the referee is not in front of you when you're doing your most awesome guard pass, that's also really helpful. Yeah, number 10, creating your own point system.

If you want to learn something, if I want to learn back takes, I create the arbitrary point system and I stick to it for months. So every time I take the back from half guard, that's 10 points. It's not in competition, but for you to learn it, like to prioritize it, give yourself more points for the things you do want to learn. If you can't do arm bar from guard and you really need to learn it, you really want to learn it, give yourself five taps for every arm bar that you do.

And if your favorite is leg locks right now and you don't really need to practice it, give yourself half a point and then count up after a hard, not a hard, but a competition where it's about performing and trying to apply your techniques with full resistance, count up all the points and then you have like a measurable number on the class. If you only got two points that whole class, you didn't perform so well and then you can analyze and if you got 50 points, it means that you made progress. Last one, defense first. Oh, this was hard for me.

I love attacking. I love just being on the offense all the time. And when you know how to defend, you get injured less. Good defense means less injuries.

And not only that, when you defend, you save, you don't gas out as much. You save your cardio for him when you need it. And when you defend, you learn to think. When you're countering and attacking nonstop, that's intuitive.

You can't really attack and think at the same time, but when you're defending, you can really think what is he after? Does he want to underhook or is he going for the leg or the back? And when you're defending, when you're just going in full defense mode, you're slowing things down. And then you again, you have more time to think, but when things are slower, you have a little bit of time to not just reflect, but also feel.

Just like when you're practicing techniques, it's a good idea to slow down. And when you defend in a role, he might waste more energy attacking than you do defending. And then defending is actually really helping you. When you understand well, you understand the attacks better too.

So if you know that when I just do this, he can choke me, next time you're going to try to choke someone and you see the hand in that place, you just taught yourself that rule that, oh, I'm not going to be able to attack because I understand how the defense works. And if you don't know defense at all, go to DefensiveBGJ.com, Britt Mikkelsen, it really changed me because he only has four defensive positions, Panda, Turtle, Running Man and Hawking. And when you learn those really well, it's incredibly hard to attack you. So I really, really, really changed my game when I started focusing on defense.

Also, this was a long video, 16 minutes. Hope you guys enjoyed this kind of monologues. Have a good day.