Saturday 2 July 2022

The Key to Success in BJJ Training



The Key to Success in BJJ Training


BJJ Melbourne

An old training partner of mine once jokingly told me that one of his pet peeves about JiuJitsu is that you cannot buy anything to make yourself appear legit. It doesn't matter if you're not very good at other sports, such as cycling, you can buy an expensive bike and gain instant respect and credibility.

BJJ was much tougher. It wasn’t possible to make yourself seem more credible by spending money on JiuJitsu. The mats don’t lie. You can buy an expensive GI or name-drop all the legends you trained but if you are lacking in actual jiujitsu skills you will be found out and exposed as soon as you start rolling. This happened quite a few times at my old gym. A new visitor with a questionable rank would turn up and get destroyed on the mats by the competitive blue belts and purple belts.
Our gym, The Carlson Gracie Boiler Room, was small and basic. Sometimes up to ten people from all over the world from Brazil & Eastern Europe lived and slept there. The training was very intense, and the majority of people who tried a class almost never returned. We just wore cheap judo gis. It didn't matter how you looked - what mattered was how many times you got tapped out on the mats and how you did in the last tournament.
Inevitably, this would change. Any sport that becomes more mainstream will always attract different types of people. In the past, BJJ was only for people who really wanted to fight. Sparring sessions at my old gym were the closest you could get to having a street fight without getting seriously injured or arrested, which is why people turned up night after night.
In some ways, I miss this type of culture in BJJ and MMA. In the past, it was about who could actually fight and about testing yourself rather than fancy gyms, sponsorships, and social media influencers.
Even if you're fighting and competing, you still need to be aware of all these new developments, but I always encourage my fighters not to be distracted by the bright lights and to concentrate on the hard work on the mats.
‘It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5 am when you've been sleeping in silk pyjamas’
Marvin Hagler

Come train with us at Australian Combat Sports Academy BJJ - 325A Darebin Road, Thornbury, Melbourne.


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