BJJ – The Difference between a World Champion and a Hobbyist

Today’s blog is going to talk about an effective way to track whether or not you are meeting your goals and desires for BJJ.  Have a think right now before reading more about what is your goal for BJJ and have a think about how much time you think you spend on it

Got that,  right now for some background information first on this blog post.

I watched the rolled up episode with Marcelo Garcia and he stated that if you do something you should do it 100% and not 80%.  The question was leading towards life balance and that if your goal is competition, then you need to commit 100%.  Marcelo was saying that he hates seeing people commit 80% because they are wasting time.  Marcelo has also made a ton of sacrifices to commit to 100%!

5:30 in Marcello talks about giving 100%. Are you wasting time?

Let me tell you about a a Robert Drysdale seminar I went to a few years back.  Someone asked the question how often they should train jiu jitsu.  Drysdale replied dead serious “No more than twice a day”, as if twice a day was completely normal for everyone.  In Robert’s mind twice a day is completely reasonable, and he has tried more than twice a day and for himself he didn’t really see any extra benefit in training more. Now that shows 100% commitment.

So back to your goals and the time you have spent training the last 6 months.  In my opinion if your goal is to compete then 5-7 sessions a week is not going to cut it.

Do you think t you will win you a World Championship at any belt level if you are training at that level?  How are you going to compete against the like of  Lloyd Irvin’s “Medal Chasers” who even as Blue belts are doing more sessions than that everyday.  These guys are 100% committed because they just train, eat and sleep Jiu-Jitsu. Lloyd Irvin is giving those guys a way of life which I think is awesome if you want that.

Do you want to compete against that?  Is Jiu-Jitsu a hobby or a way of life for you? I  have seen a lot of talk recently about “Statistics” in competition, yet out of those statistics what it doesn’t tell you is effort.  I’d like a statistic on Effective Training Time. 

Let’s do the Math and have an example of what Effective Training Time (ETT) is all about.  At it’s core it’s really about the total time you spend doing “useful” training.  Not sitting on the side recovering, or waiting in line for you next go. 

Effective Training Time (ETT in hours) = Weeks * SessionsPerWeek * EffectiveMinutesPerSession / MinutesPerHour

Person A losses to Person B in a competition and both have trained extensively for 6 months leading up to the comp.
Person A has trained 6 times a week with 1hr sessions.  Each sessions thought only has an effective training time  of 30 minutes because of warm up, cool downs, breaks, drinks, line ups for rolls and delays when teaching. 
= 26 * 6 * 30 / 60
Person A ETT = 78 Hours (80% committed)

Person B trains 6 times a week, does 2 sessions per day, each session is 1.5 hours long and has 30 minutes downtime.
ETT = 26 * 12 * 60 / 60
Person B ETT = 312 Hours (100% committed)

So Person B actually has 4 times as much effective training time as person A! He still has the same delays in class but has a slightly longer class and he has an extra lesson a day which adds up to a 4 fold increase in the Effective Training Time.

To me it’s clear that Person B is committed and training hard while Person A is kind of wasting his time and going through the motions 6 times a week!  78 Effective hours over a 6 months isn’t a lot.  I wish I could have a job were I’d only need to commit to 78 hours every 6 months. 

So work this out for yourself.  What’s your ETT for the last month and does your ETT match your goal?  How are you going to correct the imbalance?

My next blog entry will be for the hobbyist and committed BJJ practitioner alike. I’ll be breaking an awesome concept that I’ve recently learnt that will help you achieve your goals in BJJ and fix those imbalances.  This awesome scientific concept can be applied to other areas of your life as well. 

Dan

tl;dr;  Don’t give 80% to something, give 100% or less than 25%.

Robert Drysdale Seminar Review

Robert Drysdale visited my wonderful state of Queensland (QLD)  this past weekend.  Must say, this is the first time I’ve been to a seminar held by someone outside of Australia.  It’s a nice change, to get a different perspective on things.

The seminar itself was split up into two halves.  For the first half Drysdale went over some techniques he wanted to go through.  The second half was a Question and Answers session.  This I felt was both good and bad,  the questions and answers meant it was a bit harder to follow and remember all of the different techniques from the first half of the seminar.

Firstly I’ll discuss his mannerisms.  I found him to be a very quietly spoken well-mannered individual.  I was highly impressed with how he spoke, especially the language, tone and respect he gave everyone.  Big Kudus there as I didn’t find him intimating at all to talk too.

I found the technique fine details difficult to remember as it was disparate techniques around an idea.  In this case it was about takedowns and defending takedowns.   I think people were taken back by this as it’s not something we practise often. I say disparate techniques as it jumped around and didn’t tackle the same issue from different set ups. 

This teaching style was mainly visual and oral.  I would have preferred if he also had a white board even for a flow chart of the names of the techniques.  I find it’s much easier to remember everything we’ve covered if you do it this way.  I felt fine points were missing because because of the number of techniques covered.  I could sense this from the number of times he had to stop and iterate a fine details that people weren’t doing. 

I think this increased because we jumped around to different techniques.  Personally I  prefer John Will’s style of teaching – he picks a topic and shows you all types of ways to get to and use that position/move.  He incorporates simple words AND white boards.  I find this helps greatly with remembering.

Technique wise he showed some great stuff.  Then again I felt there was little details in some cases then really great details in other cases.  So it was a mixed bag so to speak.  I found what was really good was him just talking.  There he often gave great nuggets of information that you know are gold and can immediately put into your game.   Overall these bits of information were more related to concepts.  It would have been great if he taught around the concepts not an individual technique.

Questions and Answer part was quite good.  I asked immediately about training intensity and not going 100%.  One key thing he said was, don’t go limp and not fight for grips etc if you are going at an easier pace.  Don’t just give the guy stuff and go slow otherwise your timing will be bad.  This is the exact problem I’m having.  So I’ll be working out how to stay relaxed and not go with intensity, but still get what I need to done.  He did say, that you should never go hard enough that you gas yourself out in going for a submission or something.  Once you are gassed out even a new white belt can beat you.

Other questions revolved around x-guard, de la riva, brabo chokes and counter’s to knee bar defence (figure four legs).  I did find the answer to my question really provided me with great insight. Another great insight was the whole “steps” people take.  We use those because we need to learn the steps, but the reality is often we need to make all the steps happen at the same time or very close to each other.  Even a little pause gives a person a chance to make a minor balance adjustment and completely negate your move.

Overall it was a solid seminar. However the hardest part by far was remembering the fine details to all of the techniques we did because they didn’t link and build upon each other.  I’m glad he answered my question and he even answered  the heart of the issue I was having without even being told.

The key things that he covered that can directly help me now include:

• Escaping the Half guard lockdown
• Fantastic grip for attacking someone that has you in half guard
• Entry to De La Riva
• Concepts around simultaneous steps and keeping momentum
• Answer to my problem of timing
• Single leg defence
• Takedown combo.

Dan