Fools gold of BJJ training
Lets put it this way, when you first start out training Bjj you might think you know a thing or two if you did other martial arts, you'll soon realise that there is little to no cross over from other martial arts to jiu jitsu (there can be some crossover with spatial/body awareness or sensitivity training from other martial arts yes, but practical knowledge crossover is minimal at best. as someone who training other martial arts for around 15 years before starting in jiu jitsu, its both refreshing and intimidating.
so what happens....... you start you realise you dont know much so you try and find shortcuts, not shortcuts in a cheating way, shortcuts in moves or techniques that you think will help with your submissions, cause lets face it, when you first start and you are constantly getting subbed we dont think how can i get better at not being subbed, we think about how i can get better at beating other people (this is a lesson to learn in itself that we should focus on escapes first).
what do we do ? we turn to social media, we turn to youtube or instagram to find some fancy looking stuff that will "look cool" and hopefully help us get subs. So whats the problem with that ?? if we dont understand some of the core principals of jiu jiutsu its hard to incorporate these things. its like not knowing your ABC's and trying to write a fictional story using your imagination (its easier writing a storey on something we experienced just as its easier doing a move we have already done then attempting a "fictional" move we have only seen and never attempted)
When we dont understand space, balance, timing, frames, structure, how to disrupt structure or the mechanics of the submissions we are trying to do, how can we expect to do something we barely understand.
i had this happen last week in training, i saw a new variation of a bow & arrow choke which was from turtle, so i tried it out during live rolls, it worked, my training partner yelled "what the hell was that", i told him i saw it this morning and wanted to see how it went during a live roll, his response was "oh i can never pull off stuff i see online". i asked him if he understood the concept of the most basic version of what he saw....... it was a no, so we spend the next half hour going over as many variations of ONE movement he felt comfortable with (the kimura), where could we find a kimura, how can we get into a kimura from as many different positions as he could think of, how can he do a kimura without the usual entry from closed guard building on the blocks we already understand gives us a better chance of making a skyscraper then trying to reinvent the wheel everytime we step on the mat. remember, your ego is not your amigo
