Full House

Yesterday, Open-Mat time wasn't very well attended. I got there early, and started working on my knowledge using videos, lists of techniques, and rolling on the ground like I was having a string of seizures.

Cosme was there, but he had a private student to teach, and so I was solo for most of the time.

Eventually, his student left, and we went over a very tiny bit of stuff together. Not the best Open-Mat ever, but certainly not the worst. Jiu-Jitsu is really hard to work on solo.

This morning there is another free-learning time, but yesterday's attendance made me pretty leery of how things were going to go. As I sat about sipping my dawn coffee, my expectations were low. Then a text popped up from Cosme.

He was going to be there again, which made it all very much more promising, even though he said he had another White Belt to work with a bit.

He was there as promised, and soon along came the White Belt, Mike. The parade continued as Neil and Tobias came along, too.

That meant there were five, real live bodies on the mat. There was some technique work done, and a whole pile of rolling around.

It was the best Open-Mat in a very, very long time.

Homework Time

So how do you learn?

Suppose you wanted to learn how to play golf. You have never done it before in any form, but have seen it on TV, and a few friends say it's a lot of fun. You contact the local golf course, and it just so happens that a new class is about to start.

You arrive, and there are about 20 people in your group. One or two others are brand new like you, but the rest have all been around for some of the lessons already.

The instructor comes out, and teaches the lesson for the day. You get a bit of time to practise the skill being shown, but in no time the lesson is over. Let's say today's lesson is about how to get out of a sand-trap.

You come back a couple of days later for the next class. This time it's about putting. You find it interesting, and you enjoy the class, and the practice time.

Other than the 2, one-hour lessons, you are given no opportunity to practice your new skills in any form; no driving range, nor putting area, nothing.

How long would it take you to get awesome at golf?

That's kind of what it's been like for me lately in Jiu-Jitsu. My wife and I have been on an extended holiday of 8 week duration.

It has actually been quite Jiu-Jitsu friendly, as two week were withing a stone's throw of the headquarters Gracie academy in Los Angeles, and another month was within reach of two schools in Arizona. I even bumped into a seminar given by Jiu-Jitsu legend Pedro Sauer.

Altogether, I managed to attend 32 classes. The bad part is that it's as if, in the golf example, I've had my sand-trap lesson, followed by the putting class, with those followed by several dozen more unrelated lessons. After 32, how well can I perform what was covered back in lesson one?

It's actually a lot worse than that. In golf, the movements are all closely related. Teeing off and putting are a lot more similar activities than are guard defences, knee bars, sweeps, and chokes. If you are a right-handed golfer, you will always be swinging the club back to your right and then hitting the ball with it, propelling it to your left.

To get anything in Jiu-Jitsu to sink in, it takes incredible amounts of repetition, drill, and experimentation. Nowhere I've travelled has any mat-access time set aside for that sort of practice.

I've been home now for a couple of days. So far it's been structured group classes here as well. I am greatly looking forward to Friday and Saturday. That's when I'll be able to hit the mat to work on whatever I want. It will be a time to try and recall some of the really cool things I was shown down south before they fade any farther, and just maybe learn then in something beyond a superficial level.

My normal routine will have fully returned. For me a week consists of 6 structured classes, and an extra one in the city, along with two open-mat times. I will also get to work with other individuals outside of the timetable brushing up on a part of the curriculum needed for an exam, that corresponds to some of the stuff I did in Los Angeles.

Back in full, and doing my homework.

Arizona Highlight

This is our third year visiting Arizona for a month of winter. Each time I've trained at the two relatively near Gracie Jiu-Jitsu academies.

They aren't really close to where we stay, or I'd attend a lot more classes. The Scottsdale place is a half-hour freeway drive away, and the ride to the place in Phoenix is over 45 minutes long.

Both schools have very solid instructors. They and all of their students made me feel very welcome.

To synchronize as best I can with my wife, and the friends that we travel with, I only train in the daytime. Luckily, both academies have several such classes per week.

This year, the daytime sessions in Scottsdale are very lightly attended. They have all been between 3 and 4 students, including the instructor and me. As a result, there isn't any real instruction, that all being reserved for the larger evening classes. Mostly, we just roll, or work with partners on whatever. I like all of that, but it doesn't inspire me much to make the drive; leaving holiday fun behind.

Phoenix has bigger daytime sessions, but for one reason or another they haven't been having much instruction either. Part of the month was their chapter review time, and for a couple of days the instructor was away leaving things in the hands of his helpers. There was one real class of excellent instruction done by one such substitute teacher, but that has been it. Most of the other sessions have consisted of some warmup exercises, a drill or two, and then rolling. Like Scottsdale, this is all fine but doesn't motivate me to attend regularly.

For the month, I made it to about a dozen classes in total.

The exception was that at my first drop-in at the Phoenix place, I found out about an upcoming weekend filled with a training seminar by Pedro Sauer, a huge name in Jiu-Jitsu. I attended all of that as well.

A highlight happened at the very last Arizona class I went to. It was the only evening class I attended in the entire month.

I worked with a nice White Belt during the beginner class. This was followed by a smallish advanced class.

There were a couple of Blue Belts, three of us Purple Belts, the Brown Belt who runs the school, and a visiting Black Belt. The class was sort of halfway between a lesson and and open mat time. There was a really nice atmosphere.

The highlight followed all of that. The Black Belt picked me to roll with.

Now there are Black Belts, and there are Black Belts. They are not all equal. This guy is a bona fide Gracie guy. He is big, and strong, and young as Black Belts go.

The roll started like all good ones do when the two participants are as different in skill level as we were. The higher guy takes it easy, and the lower guy tries to make something work on him. It went exactly that way. I never even got close to making anything much work.

My Black Belt then started to turn it around, and started working his own attacks. I went into almost full defence, not that I had much choice. He didn't go nuts on me, but there were some moves that he tried that I stopped, and that he would try again slightly differently. This meant that I'd actually prevented the move from working, and he was trying to figure out solutions. This happened several times. We rolled for a very long time. By the end, I was pretty nearly spent.

In parting he said with a smile, "You've got SOME Jiu-Jitsu."

That made me happy.

Medicine?

Everywhere there is Jiu-Jitsu, there is talk about injuries.

In Canada, the discussion will centre around doctor visits, and their advice; physiotherapy treatments and the like.

In the States, it is much more likely to involve fringe stuff, and "this guy I know," and far less around actual medicine. One year, when my neck got a bit hobbled up, I was advised to visit "this guy," who can work wonders with cupping. If you don't know, cupping is a damaging, painful, and useless procedure that was debunked and discarded by western medicine back in the early 1800s.

Just the other day at the Pedro Sauer seminar, before class there was a guy before sitting upright in a chair with his gi pulled down off one shoulder. Another guy was was having a look, and my brain said "physiotherapist," or just possibly, "chiropractor."

Nope. The guy started squeezing the patient's shoulder with one hand like a massage, while he kept his other hand far from the patient and rapidly wiggled and snapped his fingers. Was he drawing in energy from the universe, or shaking away bad voodoo? No idea, but it was clearly some form of hokum. Nobody paid it the slightest attention.

When I badly hurt my hand a few years ago, and later my knee, I went promptly to a doctor. It would never have occurred to me that a bit of cupping or a weird one-handed magical massage would be the answer. I don't think anybody I regularly train with at home would disagree.

I don't know what causes this difference between our two countries. Is it the cost of health care, or a some kind of distrust? Is it something to do with national character, or belief systems? Is it even a wide-spread phenomenon in the USA, or have I just stumbled on a few random instances?

It would be interesting to find some empirical data about attitudes regarding this kind of thing.

Little Ponds

Here in Arizona I have run in to a few interesting personalities here in Arizona.

Let me first set the stage. I wear a Purple Belt with a cute little stripe on it. In our flavour of Jiu-Jitsu, that takes a minimum of about 4.5 years to earn, and in my case I have trained for a year more than that.

Three times this week I've run into other students who want to teach me something. It wasn't a case of, "let's learn this together," but rather, "I know this thing and I'm going to teach it to you."

One was a guy with an absolutely brand-new Brown Belt. A partner and I were rolling near him, and my buddy tried an omaplata. It was pretty good, but not tight, so I worked one of the official omaplata counters halfheartedly to make the move more difficult for him, but not impossible.

The new and highly-enthusiastic Brown Belt hurried over to show me this other, much better move that was his absolute favourite. I listened politely as he explained and then demonstrated a technique that is one of the official omaplata defences, that anybody who was doing the move that I was performing would also certainly know. Oh, well; it was his first day as a Brown Belt.

Also worked with a partner who also wanted to teach me lots of things, and to give me tons of little tips. He was a Blue Belt, with a stripe or two, meaning he has trained about 2 years less than me. It wasn't that he was spotting errors in what I was doing, but rather showing me extra techniques that had nothing to do with the lesson material that we were supposed to be working on. Interestingly, I already knew every one of the items he was so eager to bestow upon me. Why would a Blue Belt assume that he knows more than a Purple Belt? Does he do this with Brown Belts also, and with Black Belts.

He kept doing it through the entire lesson portion of the class.

When free-rolling time came, I expressed my displeasure by pressing him a bit more than I normally would. He didn't seem to like getting flipped and swept, and so pushed back with vigour, and strength. We had been warned that this would be an abnormally long, 14-minute roll. I kept pushing, but paced myself accordingly. Before the time was out, my partner was exhausted, and actually stopped moving altogether. I asked if he was OK, and he said that he was, but he still didn't move a muscle. I sank a few practice submissions on him, much like I would on a grappling dummy, and then the buzzer sounded. Never had a partner give up so completely during a role.

We were told to grab another partner for another go, but my friend said he had to get back to work, and left to get changed.

I had another Blue Belt training partner do much the same thing a couple of days earlier. He kept trying to play instructor on me, and he was an even lower rank than the other guy was. His Blue Belt didn't have any stripes at all. Granted, he seemed more knowledgeable than his belt implied. I'd say he should have a stripe or two, but he didn't.

In LA, this just doesn't happen. There are plenty of times when a student with a lower rank than me clearly knows the technique we're working on better than I do. When this happens, I solicit his or her knowledge, and they are always happy to help. However, they don't assume that they should be the teacher of somebody higher ranked without first being asked.

Maybe in these small-pond schools these guys are kind of a big deal, even though of low rank. When somebody new shows up on their turf, they think they still are.

It would be like having a Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Brown Belt drop by at our little academy up in Canada, and me trying to teach them stuff that any Brown Belt should already be expected to know.

That would be nuts.

Womens' Wear

Back home on the west coast of Canada, I rarely think about what the female Jiu-Jitsu people are wearing. That is because it is pretty much exactly what the male folks wear, and worn in exactly the same way.

In LA, for my last 3 yearly visits the situation was pretty much exactly the same as at home.

The only noticeable difference is that both at home and in LA the women were classier than the guys in one particular aspect.

Gi pants these days are almost all low-rise, which means that a lot of underpants get shown off to the world, at least by the guys. Absolutely all of the women either wear higher-rise style pants, or wear a rashguard that is tucked in properly to cover things when the gi jacket gets out of whack, which it always does.

I have seen hundreds of mens' underpants displayed on the mat, but never, ever those of any woman, until this year.

In LA 2017, a large percentage of the women are wearing the low-risers, and without having a rashguard tucked in. The result; underpants on display.

With the men, this has meant bright colours, and sometimes a print, and often a manufacturer's name in big letters. With the women it was mostly solid black, but on one occasion that sticks in my mind it was a print of little bunnies.

In Arizona, I haven't noticed this trend, as until this year I there have never been any women on the mat to train with. This year there are lots.

I haven't noticed the underpants thing, but they have a very distinctive style of wearing their Jiu-Jitsu uniforms that I've not run into anywhere before.

Gi jackets tend to gape open at the neck, sometimes to the waist. Men don't seem to worry about this, but always straighten things up when the opportunity occurs. Women, in my experience, have always been more concerned about the gap displayed, and take even more care about avoiding it.

The Arizona ladies do not. They have embraced the gap. Most wear smaller jacket sizes so that their uniform is never fully closed. Most do not wear normal full-coverage rashguards underneath. They wear girlie-style tshirts that display a hint of cleavage. They also do nothing about closing things up when their jacket is gaping, unlike the men.

I find this all very weird.

Invisible Star

Had a bit of treat this year at the Gracie Academy.

I just happened to be picking up my attendance card at the front desk as a couple was signing up for their very first Jiu-Jitsu lesson ever.

Later, they were all suited up and out by the mat waiting for the beginner class to start. They seemed quite impressed by everything, but it was about to get a whole lot cooler.

Normally this class is run by one of the less senior instructors.

Today, it was a Gracie, and not just any Gracie; it was Rener.

He introduced himself to them, and chatted a little before class. Then it began.

The students all lined up, and as always he directed them regarding the review and warmup, and set everybody to work. The new couple were rounded up and received a ten-minute private lesson with a smiling and personable Rener Gracie.

Then, the class really got going, and the new folks joined everyone else in the line.

What would this be like to somebody not in Jiu-Jitsu?

Imagine showing up to swim at the nearby pool, and the guy who shows you how to work the lockers is Michael Phelps, or you sign up for a college science course, and the guy who helps you figure out which one to take is some dude in a wheelchair with an electronic voice.

It is also as if you didn't recognize the helpful guy at the pool, or Hawking, or Rener Gracie for who they are. The new Jiu-Jitsu couple didn't.