Two Years

 

So here’s my Jiu-Jitsu mission for the next couple of years.

Why two years? Well, my rank is getting up there, and I will likely be facing evaluation for Black Belt in December of 2023, or possibly as early as 2022.

That means planning needs to be underway. In normal times it wouldn’t be as important, but Covid changes everything.

Goal One is very easy to understand. I do not want to get Covid. While it’s possible that an infection would only have minor symptoms, that cannot be counted on. Death would mess up Jiu-Jitsu considerably.

Suffering from long-term or serious complications could impact both training and exam performance.

Therefore, I’ve decided to train only with vaccinated partners who are also limiting themselves to working with only the vaccinated. Fortunately, there is a core of like-minded individuals at the local gym.

This doesn’t mean that I’m concerned if some non-vaccinated people are present on the mat as long as they are sensibly distanced. Actual training partners are a different matter, as the contact is about as close as it can be.

A downside to this is that my self-imposed rule makes training at my second-favourite gym has to be paused for now. That’s a lot of good training that I won’t be involved with.

Goal Two is to complete as many of the technical exams before heading off to a Black Belt evaluation.

The Gracies have stated many times that completing these exams counts towards belt evaluation. Call me crazy if you like, but I’d like earn them all.

A realistic amount of time to complete the 6 exams I still have to do would be something like 16 months. This assumes not losing time to injury, or illness, or not having a dedicated partner, or even dandy holidays.

A December 2023 timeline would be possible, as that is currently 26 months from now.

Completing all of the tech exams by the end of 2022 seems pretty unlikely. That is only 14 months in the future. If that is how it works out, my goal would be to polish off as many as possible.

Goal Three is to prepare for the evaluation. On top of all the regular stuff they expect of a Black Belt, the Gracies also exist on a test curriculum being worked up to a high level.

I worked with my friend Shawn when he prepared for his Black Belt evaluation back in 2018. We worked on it every chance we could, and it took about six months to polish up. That easily fits either timeline, assuming a suitable partner or partners are available to help.

Goal Four is to improve my overall Jiu-Jitsu skill. To do this, more training is better than less. In normal times this would just happen.

But now, being careful about Covid means fewer training partners, and less chances to train, at least to do it safely.

A lot of the time remaining will go towards technical exam work and Black Belt preparation. This means less time to work on general improvement.

It’s all just one big juggling act.

Last Test Ever

 

I have been a student of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu for just over ten years. It has been an enjoyable journey.

As the years went by, my rank progressed through a great many levels denoted by coloured belts, and stripes upon those belts.

Of course, my age has also progressed. I am now 65 years old.

Gaining ranks requires a certain intensity and focus in training. This doesn’t really allow much room for wider explorations of the art. It is also very hard on the body.

Things have just about reached the point in my training where I can take a deep breath, lower my intensity, and forget about rank progress.

I have two minor ranks left to earn, and should be done with that a year from now; October of 2022. There is only one possible step beyond that.

That final achievement is marked by receipt of a Black Belt.

That is an adventure in itself. A candidate’s instructor decides if the individual is ready. Normally this requires that the person is already a Gracie Brown Belt, and that all four of their Brown Belt stripe ranks have already been awarded. There seems to be some flexibility regarding the stripe ranks, but I don’t really know how that works.

Once an instructor has informed the Gracies that he wants his student tested, the candidate receives an invitation from HQ to be evaluated.

These invitations go out “early in the year,” but there may be exceptions to that. The meaning of the phrase isn’t very clear, but is usually taken to mean the invitations happen from January to perhaps April.

A candidate is invited to test for Black Belt at the next evaluation opportunity. These only happen once per year, and always just before Christmas.

As I will have the last of my Brown Belt stripes by October of 2022, my invitation to be tested for Black Belt should arrive early in 2023, for the exam that happens in December.

It was my privilege to help a friend of mine prepare for his Black Belt test throughout all of 2019. He expected to be tested around Christmas of that year, and so we got rolling in January, before his invitation came.

There used to be 4 optional technical exams. The Gracies made it known that completion of any or all of these would count greatly towards any belt exam. Shawn had previously done the first two, and our immediate goal was the get through the months of work required to polish off the rest.

He got his invitation in April, and on we worked. When the technical exams were done we slid seamlessly into working on the actual Black Belt exam syllabus. That also took many months of work, but we got Shawn heavily drilled in all of it.

My role for both the technical tests and the Black Belt test preparation was as the opponent for the material being covered. There were actually two of us in that role, simply to make it less demanding on any one person.

He went to LA in December as ready as possible, and was awarded his Black Belt.

My own plan is to do something similar between now and a Christmas ’23 test date.

Since Shawn’s test, the number for technical exams has doubled to 8. I want to get them all done. I completed the first one years ago, and have the second ready to submit. That leaves me 6 to go.

I will also have to prepare the Black Belt exam material to a high level of proficiency. Two years seems about the right amount of time to get this all done.

There is a chance that I’ll only have only half as much time to get ready.

It is possible that my instructor will submit a request to the Gracies that I test a year earlier. They might invite me after my next Brown Belt stripe promotion in February, with the expectation that I would receive my 4th in October, and then that I would test in December of 2022.

A very good thing about this is that I would be just a kid of 66 at my Black Belt test, instead of being a worn-out old man of 67.

That probably doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually pretty huge.

The downside would be that it would likely be impossible to complete all of the technical exams.

I’ve thought about both possibilities, and as both have pros and cons, would be happy about either option.

Now as to the test itself; what are my chances of passing?

My friend did his big test at about ten years younger than I will be doing mine. It was three days long, and candidates were pushed very hard. When I asked him if he would have made it if the test were one day longer, and without hesitation he said an emphatic,”no!”

I’ll be older, and will fade much more quickly than my friend. I will also be much more likely to get injured during the testing. In general, I get damaged more than my younger peers, but with exhaustion will be even more likely to get sidelined. Not finishing means not passing.

Perhaps they take age into account, but they’ve never actually said so.

I call it an even chance.

If I pass, my training will change to something more sustainable over the long haul. It is possible to continue on the mat well past my current age, but not at my current pace. Without the pressure of promotions and exams one can be much more body-savvy about things.

The plan if I fail will be pretty much the same as if I pass. For the sake of my longevity on the mat I will let the idea of a Black Belt go. My rank will become etched in stone as a 4 stripe Brown Belt.

Just as I would do as a Black Belt, I will shift gears to a sustainable pace. The pressure of promotion and exam will be permanently retired.

Just as I will be OK with either likely test date, I will also be fine with either possible outcome.

My new goal will be to continue on the mat as close to forever as possible.

 

A Long Time

Covid hit my Jiu-Jitsu world in mid-March of 2020.

We were in California, and things got bad all over. Businesses of every type were shutting down. A lot of people were getting sick.

We headed north before the month was out. The freeways were strangely empty. Went through LA, San Francisco, and Seattle at what should have been rush hour, but wasn’t.

It was good to get home to Canada. Helen and I settled in for the long haul.

My Jiu-Jitsu shut down, along with pretty much everything else.

Gracie University is well known for the programs they put online, and they moved to take up the slack. They produced a few webinars, and were soon doing zoom lessons.

I loved the webinars, but their zooms didn’t click with me. A friend of mine in North Vancouver started doing zoom lessons of his own several times a week. These became my regular online program. Real, physical classes shut down everywhere.

We didn’t see any people in any way other than on screens, or masked and at a distance in a food store.

By July I found a partner for Jiu-Jitsu who is even more Covid careful than I am, and we worked for a few weeks until his situation changed and we had to end our meetings.

Helen found a few music groups that met masked, and only outdoors, and at several times the distance people were advised to maintain.

I had my zooms from North Vancouver, and nothing else Jiu-Jitsu related. They were great, and I was happy to get them, but something was lacking.

July became August, and then September. Nothing changed, but there was a shift by October.

A young gentleman and I started meeting to train. He was doing all of his high school classes at home, and was at least as deep into isolation as I am.

We trained three times a week. There were holes in this schedule on occasion. Although I am a retired man of leisure, my partner was still working his way through online high school, and also working online towards Royal Conservatory professional-level violin and viola exams.

On through Winter, and into Spring, and into the start of Summer. In April we received our first vaccination shots.

Then, on July 1st, our provincial government changed a lot of the official restrictions. Things started to open up, and Helen and I got our second Covid shots.

The local school won’t be in real operation for classes until September at the earliest, but small groups popped up.

I still work about 3 times a week with my musical friend. To this has been added twice a week with a small group of other folks, and an even smaller group of our most experienced people on Fridays. Soon I might even add a weekly trip to train with the fully open school in North Vancouver.

Suddenly, I’m training more than I would normally have done before Covid reared its ugly head.

Of course, this could all change in a flash if something goes sour; Covid variants spring to mind. However, I’m having a lot of fun.

My sister is coming for a visit soon, and we plan on going to see more family in Victoria in August.

Things are potentially more “normal” than they’ve been in a very long time.

Rule Changes

I live in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Things have been under Covid-19 restrictions for a very long time, but that is starting to change. The government recently announced the plan going forward regarding restrictions. Of course, it is quite possible that changes will happen, depending on how infection numbers run.

In my own case, the most important changes are those that pertain to Jiu-Jitsu training.

As of May 25th, indoor low-intensity training was permitted with limited attendance. For Jiu-Jitsu this meant no rolling, or anything like it. It isn’t clear what was meant by “limited” numbers involved, but it seems to be a recommendation to keep things small.

On June 15th, low-intensity workouts will ramp up to high-intensity, and limited numbers of participants will change to reduced capacity. July 1st will see attendance going up to full capacity. On September it all goes to fully normal, including allowing spectators.

This doesn’t mean that it will actually happen that way. Covid is unpredictable, as is human behavior surrounding it. If the number of infections spikes again the timetable will go all cattywumpus again.

What does loosening of restrictions mean for my own training?

Perhaps the local school will open up again. That would be a positive development, and I might even start attending.

I might even start going into the city again to train once in a while. That has complications of its own. It would require a partner. Would I want somebody from Vancouver, with an increase in the possibility of infection, or take a partner with me from around here? There is no perfect answer. I’d be shy to use my old public transportation method. Likely I’d go by car, although the price would increase greatly due to ferry costs.

It might only mean that my personal bubble doesn’t grow as big as either the local-school, or Vancouver-school options would necessitate. Perhaps I’ll end up in a group of 3 or 4 advanced students from around here. That is also an expanding of bubbles, but far less than attendance at even a small class would cause.

Perhaps I won’t participate in any of these options, at least for the immediate future. Perhaps increased activity in a solo fashion would be the way to go for now. I’d love to be running, especially with Summer-type weather starting up, but one of my ankles hasn’t been cooperating. It has had a good long, uninterrupted period of recovery. Maybe it’s time to try it out with a short run.

If that works out, followed by a gradual increase in distance, I might just stop feeling like a slug. That might make me less interested in getting back on the mat to roll around.

A delay could be a good thing. My first Covid vaccination shot was about a month ago, and maybe a bit of a delay would see me receiving my second dose before my training increases. That would significantly reduce the danger in any option I choose.

Teacher Focus

 

My last blog entry was all about getting the maximum learning out of every hour as a student of Jiu-Jitsu. This time will examine the role of the instructor in learning.

Let’s keep it simple, and assume that your school has asked you to take over teaching one class a couple of times a week, but maybe it’s only a single class on a particular day. Your job is the same.

It is your role and responsibility to do everything possible to maximize the learning that occurs.

Step one; Prepare what you are going to cover.

It need not be a formal lesson plan, but you should know where you are starting and where you are aiming for. This should be done ahead of time so that you can really think about it.

Step two; Get to the venue early.

This will give you a chance to greet students as they arrive. Doing this will help make them feel welcome, and might perhaps settle any nerves they may be having. This is especially true for new students.

Step three; Start on time.

How can you expect the students to be there on time if the class doesn’t start when it is supposed to? I’ve been to classes that started significantly late for no apparent reason, and that finished precisely on time. This meant the students were shorted on what they are expecting.

I’ve also been a student in a class that started very late where the instructor made up for it by going well past the finish time. This once left me stranded in the city unable to catch the last ferry home. I slept in my car simply because the instructor chose to neither begin nor end on time.

Step four; This is the one area that everybody thinks denotes a great instructor. The teacher explains the actual technique, and demonstrates it.

In Jiu-Jitsu this usually means about five-minute chunks of information sprinkled throughout an hour.

Do not try and give your students everything you know in one vast vomit of information. They will not retain it, and you will bore them to death. Give them just enough to do the first small sub-section and then get them working on it in pairs.

Step five; Properly handle the students’ practice time.

This is when students work on the material for around five minutes blocks of time.

I can’t tell you how many lessons I’ve attended where the instructor seemed to think that this was their break time. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you’ve just taught several classes in a row, you might need to relax a little, but be aware that you are taking any break time from your students.

The best practice-time teaching I’ve ever seen has been by Rener Gracie, and even he can’t always pull it off. At his best, he circulates from group to group throughout the entire practice period.

He stops and watches with stoney-faced intensity. This gets even the least motivated students moving, and trying to do their best. If the pair is doing fine, he moves to the next. Maybe he helps if they need it, and then moves on again. He doesn’t try and intervene if he doesn’t need to.

This means that when he calls the whole group back under his control he has not only been helping people, and motivated others to work harder, but he also has an excellent idea as to how well the group has actually internalized the material so far. Does he modify, or clarify, or continue on with the next step of instruction and demonstration?

Conversely, the worst teacher I’ve ever seen earned that rating from me by how he handled the practice part of a class he was running.

He did the “teaching” portion perfectly well, but when he had his people start working on it, he walked to the side and talked with some friends on the side. He not only didn’t circulate amongst the students, he didn’t even glance at them.

During his next teaching part he pushed on, and actually lied to the class saying that he had seen some of them making mistakes that he then proceeded to teach corrections for. I was there watching from the bleachers, and nobody in the group was making the mistakes that he claimed that he saw.

Hard to trust a teacher that lies to his students, and doesn’t care at all if they are learning. During his one-hour class, he dedicated about half to chatting with friends.

Step six; Evaluate how things are going, and modify if appropriate.

Typically, the first part of the material covered in the night is the most familiar to the students, and also the most vital to the later segments. If something is wrong it may be better to re-teach things from another perspective.

It is normally better if the students go home after the class understanding the first slice of material really well, than to be confused and discouraged about failing to learn the five items you had planned to cover, and pushed through. It is never as clear cut as this, and is always a judgement call.

Step seven; Supervise the post-class sparring time.

This is not a break time for the instructor. They are not finished yet. They need to be paying attention to the various rolling pairs of students looking out for potential danger. Likely there will be nothing of concern, but it is the role of the instructor to be the watchdog. When all is going well they get the fun of being able to watch the students also having fun.

Step eight; The wrap up.

This is when the instructor stops the last students from rolling and declares the session over.

Now, perhaps the instructor can mentally punch the clock and head home.

Summary;

Let’s say you are teaching a single, one-hour class that has a 30 minute rolling time afterwards. By following my recommendations you were probably there 15-30 minutes early, and left with the last students maybe 10 minutes after the end of sparring time. That means a commitment of a couple of hours, or maybe a little longer.

For those two hours the teacher needed to be in operation for all of it. There are no coffee breaks. The students deserve two hours of teaching, and observing, and motivating, and correcting, and praising, and supervising.

If you can’t do two hours there is a simple answer. Don’t accept the roll of instructor.

Of course, none of this is written in stone. Let’s say you aren’t teaching a single isolated session, but a block of three classes in a row. You may have to take some break time in there someplace.

Maybe it would be impossible for you to get to class with time to spare. Can you get somebody else to open up and act as greeter? No shame there.

There are always modifications to be made.

Focus In

 

In every activity, there are those who struggle with their progress. Often, they get discouraged and eventually leave the pursuit.

Conversely, there are a few very simple attitudes and tricks that can improve any serious student’s satisfaction with how things are going.

In this article, a Jiu-Jitsu example will be given as that is my most recent major-learning activity.

First, let me describe how I perform in Jiu-Jitsu. Generally, I know how to perform the skills required better than most of my peer group. I am able to roll on a competitive basis with others much more physically gifted than myself, and who are almost always only a fraction of my age.

I am only able to do this because I am effective at learning what is being taught.

Everybody seems to understand that training more will make you better. Three classes each week would be better than two, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

We all have lives to fit our learning into, and class schedules that sometimes conflict. Let’s assume that you are able to make it to three classes per week.

Most Jiu-Jitsu classes tend to have two parts to them. The first is what I consider the instructional and practice part, and after that comes free-sparring. Almost universally, the instruction and practice component runs for about an hour.

In that hour, the instructor will explain and demonstrate chunks of material and then the students pair up to work on it. Very typically, there will be about 5 bits of instruction, and 5 periods of practice. This will vary, but most of the instructional parts will last in the neighbourhood of 5 minutes, as will each of the practice components.

So you are at a class, and the instructor calls everybody over. They then explain the first part, and demonstrate it several times, giving tips and explaining pitfalls.

How can you maximize this?

It will be short in duration; about 5 minutes or so. Give the instructor and the lesson every bit of your attention and focus. Fight to keep your mind from wandering. A trick to facilitating this is to not let your physical gaze drift from the instructor.

If you drift, give your brain a smack and refocus. It’s only 5 minutes long; you can do it. Even if you have serious problems with this kind of concentration, do the very best that you are able.

A bonus trick is to refrain from asking a question unless it directly relates to performing the technique as demonstrated.

So now you move into practice with a partner. You have 5 minutes to drill what you have been shown. If you failed to focus during the lesson period, you will already be at a disadvantage. Either way, you need to get right to work on what you were shown.

Don’t engage in small talk, or even in Jiu-Jitsu talk that isn’t about exactly what you need to get going with. Treat your drill time with the same kind of focus that you aimed at the lesson.

Either you or your partner will go first, and then it is the other person’s turn. The order doesn’t matter, but after each repetition, get your pair immediately going on the next repetition.

You don’t have to move fast or anything like that. You just need to perform the movements at an appropriate learning pace, then quickly change roles and keep going; over and over.

With five minutes of time, you should each be able to easily get 5 repetitions done. A bonus tip is that if you focus fully when it is your partner’s turn, you will get almost as much benefit out of that as you do out of your own. You’ll also get used to what if feels like when somebody pulls this particular move on you.

You would be surprised at how slowly some pairs go through their drills. Lots of chit chat, and unrelated discussion.

There also seems to be another common type of training. Many people work well, and with focus, but as soon as they think they’ve gotten the move right, they stop and just sit. They typically have to do the drill about 3 times before they are happy and stop.

That means that in their five minutes they have actually practiced the move correctly exactly once. If your pair took just as long to get it right, and then kept going and completed 5 repetitions per person, you have practiced it correctly several times more than the team content to stop after getting it once.

Then the instructor calls you all back for the next part of the lesson and demonstration. Now you get to rest for a bit if the drill was at all strenuous, and again need to give the instructor all of your attention.

So the class ends, and you stayed focused the best that you could through all of the time that the instructor was teaching, and got maximum value out of your practice time. Let’s say that you have scored 100% on pulling maximum value out of the hour. If you’d let your mind wander during teacher time, and you drifted during 1/10 of it, your hour-value score would have dropped down to 95%.

If you allowed yourself to be a 3-repetition drill practiser, then your 95% grade would slip clear down to below 85%.

Still good, you say?

Now it’s time to roll. You grab somebody who by chance started training on the same day as you, is physically almost identical to you, and off you go. You have even attended all the exact same classes over the last few years. The only difference is that you train at 85% efficiency, while he works at 100% of what he can do.

He’s 15% better than you.

You manage to shoot in an 85% triangle, which he defends with a 100% counter, gets into side mount, and tries a 100% elbow-cup-armbar, which you try and counter at 85%. Can you see where this will end up?

You might not even know why this guy regularly out performs you.

The upside is that you only need to train this way for a hour at time, and only for a few times a week.

Sadly, I’m actually being over-generous regarding how little some people work during drill time. Being somewhat sidelined by Covid, I “attend” a lot of zoom classes. Although valuable in their way, they are nothing like real classes.

One interesting side effect is that I get to spy on people when the instructor has live-class members go off to drill. Some use every moment, but many don’t do much at all. Some immediately go into play mode without doing the actual technique they were just shown at all.

Can’t live without play? After the regular class there is always about a half-hour more available mat time. This is pretty open. Some folks drill or experiment, but most roll.

These rolls can be fast and intense, or mellow and flowing. This is the play built into Jiu-Jitsu.

Is it so very hard maintaining the best focus and work habits that you can during class? I could see how it might be if it were part of a long, drawn-out type of school day. What I am asking is quite an intense brain workout, but it isn’t a day-long activity.

The classes are short and sweet, and chock-full of learning opportunities.