Rafguard

The truth of the matter is that the road to success is often filled with a number of failures.  For me, wrestling is difficult because I’m a 35 year old dude who has to work around a number of things.

My back sucks.  I have no speed.  I’m pretty much the weakest guy to ever do jiu-jitsu (relative to size, I get I’m bigger than some people).  

So sometimes before you can even get to the fun stuff, you have to create a solid foundation that will let you approach how you go about doing the things that people love to see.  

Fun shit like that.

On the first day, Eliot actually did a few exercises to help me work on my balance and improving my stance.  Those are two of the areas my man Justin Rader starts off his DVD with.

The first time I did this, I actually spent a couple days trying to work on my balance and my stance, but this time I actually had the benefit of someone helping me to correct it, who also had some exercises to help adjust my form.

And let me tell you, that was a BIG help.

During my days of doing this, I haven’t felt my back flair up and I’ve been able to do more by doing less (if that makes any sense).

This, perhaps, was the moment I could see Eliot making adjustments for my game in particular.  When I mentioned I had some lower back issues, he developed a way to go up and down the mats and alternate between standing up and being in my wrestler stance.  He understood the importance of not making me spend more time hunched over than needbe.  Because even when my back is in proper form, it still likely to act up.  The more important thing was getting the reps to understand the how and why I was doing what I was doing.

That was important.

Anyway, here’s a fun highlight of what that training session focusing just on my balance and understanding proper form looked like.

Granted, I can say with great confidence that 90% of individuals who practice jiu-jitsu have better stand up than I do.  But when working in the gyms, you sometimes have to convince people who might be looking to work on their ground game to stand up with you.  

There was one particular moment today when I went to go stand up after a scramble, only to see a look on my training partner that essentially resembled this.

Sad part is, for those who did indulge a stand up exchange, there was zero percent effectiveness on the takedowns.  

I’m not even that mad about it.  One of the things I’m working to improve about myself is the ability to take the shoot.  

My brain works a little bit like a calculator and assesses the relative probability I have of pulling off a particular move or submission.  Kinda like I’m counting cards at a casino in Vegas.

For the most part, it keeps me safe.  But when it comes to trying out new things in jiu-jitsu my brain pulls rank and won’t allow my body to try doing things.  Thus, one of the issues I face when I shoot in for a takedown.  My brain will often say, “you know, if they sprawl, you won’t be able to get back up and will pretty much collapse.”

Eliot showed this variation that helped me to get the takedown and end up in side -- a place I feel pretty comfortable with in jiu-jitsu.  

The very end was me seeing that a move would finally work after all this time.  

Afterward I took a still of it and sent it on over to Eliot saying, “that’s one of the first photos of me realizing I could actually do this.” 

It was a pretty cool day.

Before I committed to this venture, I had to sit down and take an honest look at why the previous times resulted in failure.  I also had to ask myself if I really wanted to do this?

Hasn’t the modern game evolved to the point where people don’t even really care if you pull guard, I thought.

Then I remembered basically every meme in the world hates on guard pullers.  So I either better get with the program or basically quit.

At least that’s what drawings like this seem to suggest.

A post shared by Christopher Ong (@ongy84) on Dec 26, 2017 at 12:56pm PST

That’s my buddy Ongy84 (aka Christopher Ong).  He’s stupidly talented at drawing.  I yell at him a lot about how talented he is (I recently told him I have cut and paste the sentence “I hate how stupidly talented you are” just so I can save time typing it out when I see one of his insane new creations). 

He also just got his black belt.  So he’s like two times the artist I’ll ever be.  

Anyway, enough about him.  

No, my sincere interest in trying to learn wrestling is the same as it was when I attempted this the first time.  Here were the reasons I set forth then: 

I could lead a perfectly fine life pulling guard (or shit, if I got really good at leg locks, just sitting to guard and hoping some kind of magic Eddie "Wolverine" Cummings magic avails itself to me).  But I think there’s something entirely underwhelming about intentionally ignoring one of the cornerstones of the gentle art for my own progression as a martial arts practitioner.  

I have managed to go the past five years of my jiu-jitsu journey getting by on counter-wrestling, misdirection, and (what I like to call) creative sprawling, but I see my tricks getting old real fast.  Despite the better efforts of my truly amazing instructors and training partners, my efforts to improve my wrestling skills have been marginal at best.  I know that in order to even maintain level of being “passable” as I continue to rise up the ranks in BJJ, I have to evolve.

Yep, it all comes down to my silly belief we need to be well-rounded.  And it turns out that hasn’t changed one bit.

And that involves being challenged.  That brings us to...

Day 1

Over the next thirty days, I’ll go over some of the failures I experienced during the previous iterations of this experiment.  But today I’ll address one major area that I realized I needed the most help with.

Mainly, I needed a good instructor to help guide me through it.

The previous times, I had planned to just pull some of my teammates aside and ask them for pointers and to help drill some takedowns and whatnot.  Many of them were happy to help, but I realized that a great deal of trying the instruction wasn’t being as effective as possible because I didn’t have anyone specifically trying to look at my wrestling.

Sure, I had instructors who were very helpful.  But the techniques and suggestions were never isolated to just the wrestling portion.

Moreover, I didn’t want to learn the techniques the wrong way and create bad habits that a proper guide could catch along the way.

Enter: Eliot Aguayo.

During my occasional visits to 10th Planet Van Nuys, I would put in grappling rounds with my usual brand of cohorts who were getting ready to compete.  One day, my buddy Mike Frausto suggested that we all stick around for the wrestling class after the already-grueling competition class.    

When Eliot walked in and began to lead the wrestling class, he did so in the most unassuming way.  The guy is all of about a buck forty and is a scrappy MMA fighter, but aside from the great set of techniques he lined out for the guys there was something that greatly impressed me about the way he led the class.  

His patience.

Not only did he work diligently with everyone in the class (helping us all get the right techniques), he also exhibited a good-natured and positive attitude in between savage takedowns.  When I explained to him I might not be able to move a certain way, he helped me find a specific set of alternatives that seemed a little more comfortable to me.  Specifically, he showed me a version of a takedown that might be a little more helpful to me in the future.  

I was instantly a fan.  

With that, I reached out to him and asked if I could take some private classes.  He was down.  I then explained to him that I was doing this crazy 30 days of it and he seemed absolutely geeked-out by the challenge of it all.

So we began to work.  

Our first day was a natural feeling out process.  He had me do some exercises to help me with my balance and to establish a better stance.  I was 100% correct on my estimation about his patience.  The guy was extremely encouraging and helped to ease a few of the problems I was having.  

By the end of class, I told him I wanted to drill a little bit of that double leg takedown he had taught us just a couple weeks prior.  I mentioned how I had some minor success using it since.

However, when I went to try and do it during the live drills, it didn’t work.  I would hit a penetration step, break the line, attach my shoulder to the hip, but I wasn’t quite finishing.  

Eliot began to notice this as well.  He noticed that I wasn’t fully cupping the back of his legs (almost directly behind his knees).  Even when I started to correct this, though, it still wasn’t working right.  He made one small suggestion to extend my hands beyond the knees and then pull my elbows back in when I hit the ground.

Something clicked.  

Perhaps the simplest of solutions that provided a major help to an area I thought would be a significant problem.

On Day 1, we could already mark a small success off our checklist. 

That felt good.

For those not in the know, that’s the fictional president from the NBC hit drama series, The West Wing.  Bartlett is an easy figure to get behind, he’s old, wise, and played with a whimsical kind of charisma by Martin Sheen (who was famously nominated for a ton of Emmys, but who never won a statue for his interpretation of this legendary character during his tenure on the show).  

Nonetheless, the way Aaron Sorkin and co. used the phrase always left an impression with me.  On the show, the president and his crew would have to struggle, scrap and claw their way to get legislation passed.  So when the team would have a major success, the lesson wasn’t just to be content with a win.  It was to already get to work on next big thing.  

Sure, take a day to enjoy your relative success, but momentum is a real thing.  You don’t want to lose it just because you become complacent with one home run.

Everyone knows the fun is in the chase.

As I got around to figuring out what I wanted to accomplish in the year 2018, I was pretty happy that I accomplished just about everything I set out to do last year.  

That’s when I had to ask myself the question I’d often ask others.  

And after some deep soul searching, it only seemed logical that after a successful 2017, it would be time to turn to something I had once failed at.

My attempt at going through Justin Rader’s Hybrid Success Formula Instructional DVD.  About a year and a half ago, our good pal Rader sent me this awesome DVD that’s designed to help those jiu-jitsu practitioners who might struggle with implementing wrestling into their game.

In other words, someone pretty much like me (and the hundreds of thousands of people who might just sit to guard two seconds after slapping hands).  

I like to pride myself on being a man of my word.  So when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.  When I don’t finish projects (especially those I really want to do), it stays with me.  Around late November, I decided it was time to give it another shot.

I had tried doing 30 days of wrestling, inspired by Rader’s DVD two times before.  Both times failed for a number of reasons (some things being out of my control, others directly my fault).  Taking into consideration the failing points on both of those attempts, I formulated a new plan.  

Although, it wasn’t until I met a solid wrestling coach that I knew a third attempt would be feasible.  More about that later.  

So when we get around to talking about what’s next for me.  It’s this.  

30 Days of wrestling on this site.

And yet, when I asked them to write out what they wanted to accomplish in the year 2017, they all took pen to paper and obliged every one of my prompts.  By the time we finished, I asked them to give me one year to see if I could help them reach some of their competitive and personal BJJ goals.  

Outside the world of jiu-jitsu, I’ve been lucky enough to have accomplished a number of the lofty dreams and goals I’ve set my mind out to do.  My thought became “why not clue these guys in on a few of the things that had brought me success in other fields.”  The least I could do was lend my skills of producing and organizing to help guide them in areas I felt were appropriate. And after a breakthrough year in my own jiu-jitsu journey, I began to see a larger place for my role as a grappler amongst my friends.  

Not as a jiu-jitsu interviewer, or jiu-jitsu comedian, or even as teammate who is willing to put in extra rounds and start in terrible positions to help his teammates for competitions and superfights, but rather as a leader for a group of extraordinary grapplers.  

In short, I would finally find purpose.  

As the months flew by, I watched a number of these guys do incredible things.  Together we’d start a thriving new business.  And in the span of a year, we would create some amazing memories that extend far beyond hours of training on the mats.  

However, few things would be more satisfying than watching them accomplish a number of the goals and dreams they had written down only a few months prior.  With every win or podium finish, it was nice to feel like we all played a role in one another’s success.  And my role would be little more than a guide, offering some suggestions here and there to push them when it felt most appropriate.  

And as a result, they would help me achieve many of my own goals.  I never ask people to do something I wouldn’t do myself.  So I jotted down my own grappling goals and shared those with them.  

My 2017 Goals

Become a more sound BJJ technician.

Get one step closer to my purple belt.

To help provide the structure needed for The LA Jiu Jitsu Club become an even bigger business.

Give a platform to more BJJ practitioners to tell their story.

Double the numbers for Verbal Tap across all platforms

What feels good, as I sit here counting down the last few hours of 2017, is the satisfaction I have of accomplishing every single one of those goals.

There’s something about the importance of accountability.  Anybody can make goals, but it’s an entirely more difficult thing to put down your goals, tell your trusted friends those goals, and then actually go out there and do that shit.  

For one, it’s super scary.  What if you fail?  

Most people will fail without ever having to worry about letting others down, or that other people will know their goals.  It’s always been my belief that the high-wire act of actually telling people your goals far outweighs the benefits of keeping it all to yourself.  

So when I wrote out my goals, I thought about the very things that I truly want.  For me (a guy who doesn’t care to compete), it’s far more important to be a sound technician than it is to be a human grappling highlight machine.  I just want to be quietly good.  

But this past year, I was given more opportunities to teach and lead classes.  That’s always felt like my fellow instructors, coaches, and peers saying they have faith in my techniques (cuz it sure as hell ain’t my strength or speed).

This year, I also got my fifth stripe on my blue belt -- inching me ever so closer to that next step of the journey.

I also helped to bring new business and direction to my pals at The LA Jiu Jitsu Club.

I’m happy to have interviewed close to 100 people over the year and do my part to help share their stories.  As we all work to make this sport bigger, every little bit helps.  And I thank the athletes for trusting me enough to help tell their stories.

And finally, I was proud to see our podcast do even bigger numbers than ever.  I always dream big, but when I put down I wanted to double the numbers I knew it would require more work.  But when you start to talk about an increase of hundreds of thousands of listens, views, and downloads, you feel a great sense of validation that your work is appreciated.  

Of course, with great success comes great gratitude.  I’m very thankful to the people who helped me grow this year and who helped me accomplish so many of my goals.  

In the coming days, I plan to take exciting new steps in my own grappling career (and yes, I’ll get around to explaining the stupidity behind this website name).  During that time, I’ll share some of the goals I’m looking to accomplish this year, along with a number of new exciting elements to the next chapter of my journey.