It's Not Who's Best, It's Who's Left

My opponent had about a hundred pounds on me and I was sitting on my butt. Choking him seemed like the best option. He moved forward, grabbing my knees, trying to force me onto my back. I shifted my hip to keep balance & snatched his lapel. The jacket was untucked which made for an easy grab. The choke was right there, but this guy knew me and he turtled into his jacket to avoid the attack. My choke was gone, but he was blind under that jacket and his posture was broken. There was an opportunity to sweep him & I launched my hips forward, intent on hooking under his knee with my right foot. He lunged forward too, trying to get his hips back under his shoulders. My toe and his knee made contact with an audible pop. I tapped fast & shoved him off. I'd dislocated toes before. It felt like that. I took a deep breath and prepared to pop the toe straight. Then I looked down & noticed the blood. I contorted to get a better look. "Coach, I'm gonna need some help. There's a bone sticking out of my foot." -February 17th, 2014

As I write this, I have been a Jiu-jitsu practitioner for slightly more than a decade. It's a relatively short span of time in the scheme of things, and so it seems remarkable to me the degree to which I've been able to witness the art evolve. Some martial arts aren't interested in evolution. Some are convinced of their own perfection. Some strive to preserve a cultural tradition and avoid change to maintain a link to the past. Jiu-jitsu is different.

A Jiu-jitsu mat is a laboratory studying human anatomy, leverage, and momentum. The goal is to find out what works. Truth is pursued with ruthless efficiency. The more scientists in the lab, the more progress is made. The more progress is shared, the more scientists can build on that foundation. So part of the reason Jiu-jitsu seems to be evolving so quickly is that evolution is its goal. Part of the reason is that its surging popularity has brought more people onto the mat, more scientists to the lab. Another reason is a simple advantage of the modern world: the internet allows us to share what we know, and makes it easy to crib notes off others (such as those studying Judo, Sambo, Wrestling, etc.). I can understand all that in an abstract social science kind-of-way, but it's still extraordinary to watch.

I have watched my own students progress, almost uniformly faster than I did as a white belt, and I've realized that the standard I hold my students to has inflated since I was a beginner myself. There is a technical repertoire and a depth of understanding that I expect from a blue belt that I don't think I possessed when I earned that rank. I don't think I was a bad blue belt. I just think Jiu-jitsu is growing.

In response to that belief, I can sit back and marvel at the wonder that is progress. I can panic a bit and push myself in my own training for fear that a younger generation will overtake me...and sometimes I do that, because that fear can be a helpful motivator, but mostly what I do is try to keep the evolution going. I ask myself: how can I make my students better than I was when I was in their shoes? How do I instill, not just physical ability, but scientific understanding, so that my students can discover stuff that's cooler than what I know?

There are a lot of ways that my coaching is shaped by these questions, but at this point you're probably wondering what all this has to do with my busted toe. Two things: First, these are the sorts of things I think about when injuries keep me off the mat. Second, injuries keep people off the mat. They keep scientists out of the lab, and that's a problem.

Laying in a hospital bed after emergency foot surgery, I thought about what I could have done differently. When my opponent ducked into his jacket, I could have posted off of his lapel and stood up to take his back. I didn't because I was being lazy at the time and standing up can be tiring. I didn't because I think butterfly sweeps are more fun than taking the back. I was being stubborn. I was trying to force my favorite things to happen rather than accepting what was happening naturally in the roll. I learned valuable lessons from that injury, but it took me away from the mat. It was painful, and it was expensive.

I tell my students if they get hurt they should figure out what happened and think about how they could have behaved differently. It's easy and natural to blame the other guy: He was being a jerk, he was a spaz, he was muscling it, etc. but the other guy's attitude isn't in their control. They can learn to control themselves. Turning injuries into lessons helps people to keep growing. They may lose some time on the mat, but with luck they'll come back a bit smarter and not make the same mistakes again. Ideally, the injured person will be able to share what they've learned so others can get the lesson without the injury.

As a coach, I try to speed up the learning process for my students by walking them around the pitfalls that slowed me down. I try to encourage them to think critically by always explaining what I'm asking them to avoid and why. To teach those lessons, I need to have deciphered a lesson from my injury. To do that, I need to recognize that an injury has occurred.

My toe was pretty obvious. So were the half dozen less severe dislocations, the cracked ribs, the handful of black eyes, the hyper extended knee, and the couple of nasty neck cranks I've experienced over the years. They're things I remember and things I've learned from. There have certainly been more injuries over the years and there are lingering aches and pains that my memory can't attach to any specific incident. There are times that my body feels weak or inflexible and I've learned to fight around the limitations of my attributes. For a time I chalked it up to getting older, to natural wear and tear, that I believed was unavoidable.

Learning to compensate for limitations, to rely on skill over athleticism, has been a useful process. Writing off the minor aches and chronic limitations is one of the pitfalls I now try to walk my students around. When the body slowly gets weaker with no obvious cause, no acute injury, it's easy to say, "Well, what do you expect? I'm not 22 any more" and dismiss it as inevitable. Here's a counter argument: My friend Katie Kent says, "Mostly, our bodies don't grow old. They break down, and we can build them back up."

Most of those accumulating, limiting, aches are the result of injuries. They're just injuries that happened in slow motion so that we didn't notice. They're the result of years of slouching bad posture, of failing to stretch and massage tense muscles, of allowing muscles to grow weak and shift their burdens to their neighbors. Most adults in the modern world have bodies that are in terrible disarray, and while practicing martial arts can offer a boost to certain aspects of fitness, it can also put extraordinary strain on already compromised systems.

The good news is it's almost all reparable, once you recognize that there's an injury to repair. The first step to solving a problem is always acknowledging that a problem exists. The bad news is that the repair process, like the injury, tends to happen in slow motion. Injuries that come from a lifetime of ingrained bad habits can't be fully fixed without altering the habits that created them and that's difficult, slow, work.

The sort of exercises that tend to fix broken posture and imbalanced muscles are rarely exciting to practice, or impressive to watch. Constantly watching yourself to avoid slipping into old, bad, posture habits can be mentally fatiguing. Progress is made slowly and only through consistent effort. For me it's a challenge to find time for such exercise in a busy schedule, and more, it's a challenge to discipline myself to the practice of exercises far less thrilling than the grappling matches that I tend to think of as my regular workout.

I still do the exercises. I've acknowledged that I have a problem. I've built my Jiu-jitsu on a foundation of broken posture. So now I have to fix it. In this, I'm hardly alone. I once attended a seminar with 6 black belts. When it came time to roll the youngest of the 6 participated. The other 5 sat against the wall discussing the various aches and pains that were keeping them from the mat. Shrugging, "We're just getting too old for this." One of the black belts suggested the fact that students seemed to be learning faster these days was cause for hope. He said it meant more people would be getting their black belts before they were too old and injured to use them.

I think it's great that people are learning quickly, but I also have my eye on longevity. I'm in the process of fixing my posture, but an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure and it's easier to repair a foundation before you've built a house on it. When I'm lecturing new students on technique there's a lot I say to help them avoid acute injuries, "Don't do X because you'll get stacked on your spine and injured." But I also find myself talking more and more about general postural habits and muscle balance. "Jiu-jitsu does a lot with the hips and it's easy for people to strengthen the legs while neglecting the abs, but that leads to lower back pain down the line. So make sure your abs are turned on". I show exercises that teach Jiu-jitsu specific movements, but also exercises that balance those movements. "In Jiu-jitsu we spend a lot of time hunching up, but it's just as important to be able to expand your chest; pulling your shoulder blades together and down your back."

Earlier I mentioned Jiu-jitsu learning from other arts like Judo and wrestling. I think that's great, but there's knowledge outside the martial arts that's potentially a huge resource for Jiu-jitsu and it's in the fields of sports medicine and exercise science. There are people whose job is using science to maximize athletic performance. When they talk, I listen. Every time I do that, I seem to learn something that helps me to be a better Jiu-jitsu practitioner, or a better coach. What I learn, I share. I want to learn to fix where I'm broken, so that I can teach my students to avoid breaking down in the first place. Jiu-jitsu is science on the mat. I want Jiu-jitsu to learn all it can from science off the mat.

In the end there's a pretty simple formula for getting good at Jiu-jitsu: Have fun so you never want to quit, and avoid injury so you never have to quit. Keep a lot of healthy scientists on the mat, and the rest tends to take care of itself.