Caffeine Induced Airport/Travel Rant

I apologize for having not updated my blog in such a long time.  The heading of this blog post is exactly what this is.  As an update for my participation in the IBJJF Worlds, I figure I’d throw out how my trip has gone thus far.  I have been in Los Angeles for a full 7.5 hours at the current time of typing this post, have gotten perhaps a collective three hours of sleep and was forced to eat McDonald’s or (seemingly) die of starvation.  I had always wondered and fantasized about how easy it would be to live in southern California so that I could train at some of the best schools in the world and then travel to the top tournaments in the world quite easily, but if I were to only do two, three or perhaps four tournaments in California per year, wouldn’t it be just as easy to live somewhere on the east coast and then fly out to California when necessary?  There are, after all, great schools in the eastern states.  Let me put into perspective my personal traveling experience, comparing what it’s like to drive to New York City for a tournament and what it’s like to fly out to California:

Weeks in advance, I purchase my ticket to California and begin planning what days I need to leave Pennsylvania and, of course, return back home.  I may not be able to find a direct flight from Pittsburgh, and in this case, I needed to connect in JFK or else pay an astronomical price just to connect in a more ‘logical” area (somewhere between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles).  I chose the cheaper flight, which happened to be a steal, sacrificing what convenience I’d otherwise have.  I get ready to board my plane and fall victim to a somewhat common woe that passengers sometimes face – a delayed flight.  My plane from Pittsburgh to New York is delayed 45 minutes, and then again another 45 minutes when we are sitting on the tarmac.  Luckily my connection in New York was very long and I was able to make my next flight with plenty of time to spare, though I didn’t expect what was going to happen next.

I arrive in Los Angeles, happy (though sleep deprived as I can never fall asleep on planes) to be in my final destination and ready to get to my teammate’s apartment to rest up for a day of training, until my worst fears come true at baggage claim.  My baggage is nowhere to be found.  They tell me that it, for whatever reason, was set on another plane and that I’d have to pick it up at 10:00AM the next day (a time that I am, at the time of writing these words, awaiting eagerly).  They told me this at 12:45AM.  I had to choose between taking the time and money to go from LAX to Pasadena, then waking up early and taking the trip from Pasadena to LAX to retrieve my luggage and then from LAX back to Pasadena one more time, all the while disrupting my friend’s sleep schedule, or I could simply stay in the airport until I retrieve my luggage and then leave at a more ‘appropriate’ time of the day.  I chose the latter and rather grumpily frumped around for hours, hungry and cold, inappropriately dressed for airport air-conditioning, unable to find even a Denny’s that was open.  The only 24 hour restaurant in the area was closed for renovating this particular day.  Perhaps if I were not so cheap, none of this would have happened and I could have just taken a direct flight that would have transferred my luggage like what was originally supposed to happen, but I want to save what money I have as a broke blue belt to make it to the other big tournaments later in the year. 

            In my grumpy tantrum I was yelled at by a foreign woman for unplugging her unattended-to phone from the only outlet I could find so that I could charge my own laptop and phone, which were on their way to electronic-suicide, and was given a sweatshirt to wear by a woman who was waiting with me in the terminal before the workers could start their shifts.  After being handed the sweatshirt, she proceeded to tell me she’s been “feeling sick”.  I asked if I should be wearing the sweatshirt and she assured me that she only feels sick because she ate some really bad Mexican food the other day and she thinks she’s probably pregnant, or something.  Thankfully I had nothing to worry about.  I decided to take the sweatshirt off and walk around the airport a bit more to find the closest restaurant that would be open the soonest.  It was McDonalds, and I ate my egg white McMuffin and hashbrown like a champion should as soon as it opened for business.  While I’m quite ashamed at what I needed to eat and I was upset at what I had to go through, it is perhaps a consequence of my previous choices and a lot of bad luck.  Either way, it is a rough way to start a week of training at a new gym before the biggest tournament in the world.  Comparatively, my trips to New York City for No-Gi Pan Ams and the New York Open consist of figuring out what time I will leave before the weekend of the tournament to get to my parents’ house in Philly and then figuring out when to leave the morning of the tournament so that I get there in time for my division to start.  Generally there is no trouble other than waking up very early in the morning to compete in the very first division of the day (which is usually blue belt adult rooster weight). 

Living in California certainly seems great to me, though I suspect the travel is equally as difficult for the competitors living on the west coast that want to compete on the east coast – luckily for them, most of the major tournaments such as the IBJJF Worlds, Nationals, Pan Ams, No-Gi Worlds, and a few big “International Open” events are all hosted in the southern California region or within reasonable driving distance of it.  The only major tournaments on the east coast are No-Gi Pan Ams…and perhaps the New York Open, which happens to draw a lot of competitors due to its importance as being one of the only major gi tournaments in the northeast that is easily accessible by people in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Boston alike.  Is this unfair to east coast competitors that we must deal with the travel expenses and difficulties more so than west coast competitors at the highest level of competition?  It’s worth a thought.  Perhaps the IBJJF could consider moving worlds or Pan Ams around between New York City and Los Angeles each year…there may be a lot of schools in Southern California, but there certainly aren’t a lack of schools in the Mid-Atlantic, and there are a whole lot of good wrestlers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Am I the only one that thinks this way?  Perhaps I’ll think differently after a good night’s sleep and a good day of training.

Tunnel Vision

I think everyone that practices Jiu-Jitsu, especially those that have been in the sport for more than a year or so, experiences some form of tunnel vision.  You practice a move and become obsessed with it – constantly refining a move until you know it inside and out, operating within a position that you know so well and continuing to develop it.  What happens when two people meet that have both practiced a position so much?  More often than not, there is some sort of stalemate.  Nothing can be done by one person that will trick the other person into giving up a submission or giving up control.  One person will not gain the advantage for more than a split second.  Of course this is the archetypal representation of such a situation – usually there is a slight difference in technical ability or a slight difference in who is fighting “better” on that particular day that the two hypothetical practitioners meet, and one ends up as the victor.  Has tunnel vision helped or hurt these practitioners?

Much of this above scenario was meant to highlight the concern that many people have over what many dub “footsies”, the somewhat common berimbolo/leg-lock game that people are practicing in tournaments today.  Some people are against it, some people are for it and of course some people remain indifferent.  I had a tough time deciding my position on it, and my conclusion is that I have no immediate conclusion on this game.  As someone who likes to think of himself as a well-rounded Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, I’d like to explain a bit of my development in the sport to help support my theory on why people choose to play this game.

I started off small – well, I stayed that way – in the art of Jiu-Jitsu.  As a small, weak player, I found it very difficult to keep my balance fighting not only my opponent, but also gravity.  My passing game was not horrible, but it wasn’t excellent.  My guard, however, is what developed first and continued to develop in a relatively streamlined way to help me fight against the biggest guys in the gym.  I had not wrestled previously and had a very under-developed takedown game, and in the few tournament matches I had done, I would typically pull guard unless the other guy pulled it first.

As of now, I’d say my passing game has improved quite dramatically and I am much more “even” than I used to be, but I imagine that in some alternate universe there is a Dean that never focused on his passing and continued to be a guard player – his guard is probably very developed compared to myself in reality and he must feel very confident there.  Knowing that there are indeed people out there that have spent the majority of their time improving their guards, having faced the same situation as I have when starting in Jiu Jitsu, it is a bit more understandable that two players may meet up that want to pull guard immediately.  They are most confident in their guards and prefer to play that game rather than take their chances playing their weaker game against someone that wants to be in their guard.  When the tournament is over and the person perhaps lost by an advantage (almost having their back taken in a berimbolo war), would this person choose to develop his ways of passing his opponents guard so that he can get to side control – one of his other undeveloped positions – or would he instead focus on filling the holes he has in his nearly perfect guard game?  When the opposition is so adept at one position and can shut down guard players and passers alike, it may be better to continue working on his weaknesses in his guard rather than letting his guard lag behind to develop his passing – which, at the end of the day, could be insufficient to beating this opponent the next time the two meet.  Being able to win sometimes means prioritizing one’s training time and becoming advanced enough at one thing to implement a winning strategy in a competition, and becoming the coveted master of all trades is often unrealistic – one instead often becomes the jack of all trades and master of none. 

This is how tunnel vision can often shape one’s Jiu-Jitsu career, and it may start before people even choose to become major competitors – it starts with what is being practiced early on in one’s career, what is being drilled and what the focus of training is on.  Practicing only one’s strengths in the gym may be satisfying, and it may feel good to know that one is the master of a certain position (for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with the berimbolo, but this applies to many other positions and moves), but if one never practices how to pass and is shut down in a double guard pull scenario where both players are fighting to take the back, it won’t even seem like an option to “work on passing” because “that’s not really my gameplan”.  It isn’t one’s gameplan because it was never practiced and never stressed early on in one’s development.  This is the same with takedowns – being able to take any person down works until this strategy is shut down by somebody stronger, or by someone that, in some way, is better at takedowns.  What happens when one is taken down by someone even better and is placed on his back where he is out of his element?  The person may try to get better at takedowns so that he is not taken down ever again, and it may work.  It also may not work, and he may end up having the second best takedown game in the world.  Having practiced to have a better guard may have been a better investment of focus and time in the past rather than practicing takedowns to an obsessive degree, which eventually created diminishing returns in the grand scheme of one’s whole Jiu-Jitsu game.

Simply regretting one’s gameplan isn’t the answer – training to overcome the deficiencies in one’s game, even if it means bruising the ego that you thought you didn’t have, might be the best decision to make in the long run.  In conclusion, it always depends on the situation and the fighter at hand, though I generally think that people should practice a well-rounded game from the start in order to avoid situations such as these where they believe they “cannot” or “should not” try to get better at some other aspect of Jiu-Jitsu because it doesn’t fit with their style.  That is not to knock the technicality of these practitioners, whatever the focus of their game may be, but more to play devil’s advocate and challenge their preconceived notions.

What do Belts Mean?

When I first began my journey in jiu-jitsu, I never thought of the difference between each higher belt.  Everybody, to me, was simply either a white, blue, purple, brown or black belt.   The belts told you different things about the person’s technical ability, but nothing more.  Four and a half years later, my perception is once again (like it always is, it seems) changing on how I view grapplers.

            Some white belts can be more advanced than others who are just starting, but the line between blue and purple, purple and brown and brown and black is so incredibly blurred at times.  If a person has been training for a year, how do we quantify the amount of time that he’s been training?  Do we leave it at “a year”?  Do we say he’s been training for 2 or 3 times a week?  Do we count the mat hours and say he’s had 150-200 mat hours?  Do we count the little bit of time he may have taken to get a drink, or stopped and talked to his training partners as a part of his “mat hours”?  A gym can have such a varied group of people – the way jiu-jitsu schools are set up so that practice is optional really exemplifies the fact that hard work pays off in the gym.  A blue belt that has been training for two years at a pace of six days a week, twice a day and doing strength and conditioning may be more advanced technically than the “recreational” purple belt who stuck out their training for six years at 2-3 times per week.  It is this aspect of jiu-jitsu that I find interesting because we often see belt rank meaning next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. 

            Gyms can hold people to different standards for competition reasons.  Seeing some of the purple belts of today that are winning major IBJJF tournaments, it’s interesting to think hypothetically what people would think if they were to strap on purple belts and march into a school where they are not known.  Many of them could probably out-perform some “recreational” black belts that run clubs and small schools, and could give very tough matches to even competitive black belts.  Some people call this “sandbagging” – withholding a rank so that one is at a higher technical level than others in one’s division – yet some of the best people competitors have not been training for a particularly long time when measured in years – again, it comes down to that dedication that they show in the gym every single day.  It comes down to the summation of those precious minutes in the gym when others are taking a break to push to the next level, and to push through the pain of training multiple sessions per day when others may have other commitments.  It comes down to the pure, raw mat time spent drilling and rolling, and those empty hours after class studying tape and shadow drilling on the floor, thinking of the next technique to work on – these are the things that set competitors apart from people that train for recreation, and for some reason it is often ignored even though it is infinitely more difficult than just letting your membership at the academy run up for the year.

Interview by Dan Yun

My friend Dan Yun of the Turtleguard blog recently conducted a mini interview with me.  Thanks Dan!  Dan has been a good training partner of mine for a few years now, check out his blog for some other good stuff!

http://turtleguard.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/exclusive-video-interview-2012-no-gi-pan-am-gold-medalist-dean-lewis/

Do you dig the reap?

I recently posted on a well-known MMA and grappling forum concerning the “reaping the knee” rule that we see in many high-profile grappling tournaments.  In some new professional tournaments, we note that reaping is often, in fact, legal.  Reaping the knee is when pressure is caused on the knee due to torque from a specific outer-leg entanglement, often resulting from leg-lock attempts or the use of one-leg X guard.  When the outer leg crosses over the hip of the person being ankle-locked, it is generally seen as “reaping”.  One of the major problems with this rule is that it is highly subjective, often leading to disqualifications in tournaments when there is, in fact, no torque at all on the knee.  The results from the thread were somewhat shocking to me, being that most people wanted to see the rule abolished or reformed; regardless, we see the rule getting progressively stricter and being the cause of many, many DQs over the course of many large tournaments.

            Most people seemed to reason that the rule should stay in place for lower belt levels – we, as a community, would be subjecting white, blue and possibly purple belts to a lot of danger if we were to legalize reaping at these levels; however, when we get to brown and black belts, we begin to see kneebars and toeholds.  Should brown and black belts really be subjected to rules that limit their attacks by so much?  Are brown and black belts not knowledgeable enough to defend themselves from injury from a position that is likely no more dangerous than a toe-hold in the first place?  Any sport that encourages bending joints in the opposite direction from where they should go is inherently going to risk injury to its practitioners – it’s par for the course.

            Another argument I feel is even better, should you not like the idea of reaping still, is that banning the position promotes nothing more than its ignorance.  Judo currently bans leglocks of all kinds, and as such a judoka is more likely to get caught in a straight ankle lock assuming they have not practiced its defense.  We can say the same for BJJ practitioners that haven’t learned how to defend against reaping.  Resisting against a reap could certainly damage one’s knee, but giving up the position will not.  It is a reasonable concession that one has to make, especially at the brown and black belt levels, seeing as they are roughly the equivalent of “professional”.

            A way I like to view reaping is to lump it in with other positional moves rather than with submissions.  Reaping is not entrapping – if one is trapped by their opponent when getting their knee reaped, then it is no longer what I would consider reaping, but a submission instead.  The legitimacy of these submissions would be another issue.  Turning with a reap should allow the pressure to come off of the knee and allow the practitioner to get out of the position unscathed.  I believe that people are getting caught in reaps from ignorance of the position.  People are trying to find ways to stay away from 50/50 guard for different reasons, but the idea of defending against the position is essentially the same.  Keeping reaping illegal is discouraging “risky” positions (based on the rules) such as one-leg X guard from being prominent in competition, thus essentially halting the growth of jiu-jitsu as an all-encompassing grappling martial art.  This is incredibly unfortunate for our community.

To play devil’s advocate, is it worth it to risk knee injury in young competitors for the sake of having a position made legal?  I believe that it is, considering that knee reaping still happens quite often in competition and training itself.  The risk will not be much different than it already is in this martial art.  The risk of injury in a martial art designed to incapacitate an opponent will always be present, and I believe rules should only be made to prevent the most dangerous of injuries – neck cranks and spinal locks can be considered too risky to mess with.  It is one thing to see a person with a knee injury and a completely different issue to see one with a broken neck, paralyzed or dead.

What are your thoughts?  This is a very controversial issue that could use the input of practitioners all across the board.  If enough people feel strongly one way or the other, we could see the status of this rule change in the future.  Leave your comments below.

Sport? Art?

There is a reason why I often refer to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as an art rather than a sport – I believe the sport aspect is one particular facet of BJJ, but it’s not the only reason people train.  Many people train BJJ just for the fun of it, or for discipline, and never intend to compete in a tournament setting.  Even John Danaher is known for never having competed in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, yet he is known as one of the best teachers in the world.  When I call Jiu-Jitsu an art, it allows me to talk about it a little bit differently than I would with football, baseball or wrestling.  The whole sport vs. art thing has now recently come under fire with specific events, such as Andre Galvao vs. Ryron Gracie at Metamoris, and the general trend toward using new guards in sport jiu-jitsu that many “old-school” jiu-jitsu practitioners are very against.  One of the main arguments is that true Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu doesn’t use new inverted guards, 50/50 guard or much of the De La Riva guard because they do not transfer well to self-defense situations.  I personally reject this idea.  There is also a segment of people that claim that these new positions and concepts are the future of jiu-jitsu and are to be practiced in order to win competitions.  For the most part, I reject this idea as well, though I will preface my position by saying that I don’t believe it is my business to tell people how they should practice jiu-jitsu – that’s up to everyone else to decide.

            The art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was, of course, based off of self-defense tactics.  The basic closed guard is essentially one of the most important concepts to learn, and it seems as if most people understand this.  In terms of strategy, this is where things go…awry.  Pulling guard in a street fight would certainly be dangerous and risky in most situations, but of course I’m sure someone, somewhere has done it and been okay.  Pulling guard in MMA is often risky as well, though less often so because of mats and not having to worry about your opponent’s homeboys coming in and stomping on your face – we see some very high-level jiu-jitsu practitioners pulling guard in MMA with great results, and I believe that is their prerogative if they want to do this.  We have seen these new “trendy” guards such as deep-half guard actually used very well in MMA to sweep under certain conditions.  Is it right to say that it’s not pure jiu-jitsu?  Is it right to somehow qualify it and say that it’s not okay to use it?  It’s possible that one day we’ll see someone get berimbolo’d in a high-level MMA fight by a De La Riva-crazy, buttflopping jiu-jitsu practitioner turned MMA fighter that just has some higher understanding of the position.  We have seen twisters and gogoplatas in MMA, so to say that those techniques don’t work in a fight is just entirely false.  The techniques clearly work and still utilize leverage and superior positioning, which is essentially the mission of jiu-jitsu.  To say that they are to not be practiced because we feel that they are not good for self defense is short-sighted – sticking to these old ideas without taking the painful years it may require to use these techniques in competition and apply them to other situations is antithetical to the original mission of BJJ.  If we had stuck to caveman-esque ideas in the first place, we’d all just be lifting weights and throwing haymakers still.

            Who is to say what can be considered art and what can be considered sportive?  We all have different interpretations and different senses of what works for us and what doesn’t work in terms of grappling.  Perhaps this is a reflection of my incredibly lax nature on how I treat people in general, but I think it’s most fair to give people the opportunity to develop a game that works for them rather than limit their skillset to moves that are “pure jiu-jitsu”.  The idea that Ryron’s breed of jiu-jitsu is somehow superior to Andre Galvao’s jiu-jitsu essentially break down when we see Ryron fail to submit him under a submission-only ruleset that would, hypothetically, favor Ryron.  The point being made here is that even “point fighters” that compete largely in point competitions are placing themselves into better positions in which they can achieve a submission – that doesn’t invalidate their grappling ability. 

Andre Galvao and Ryron Gracie are both high-level practitioners with their own styles of jiu-jitsu that should be respected, and neither one is pure or not-pure.  The largest reason I reject the stance of very sport-oriented individuals is mostly personal preference.  I don’t believe BJJ is only to be practiced for winning tournaments – a medal is just something that hangs around my neck if I win, and not the ultimate end goal.  There are always places to improve – if I do win a match in a tournament by points, I’d like to win it by submission next time.  If I win by submission, I’d like to win faster the next time.  This is my mindset, and I’m sure many people share it, though many do not.  Many see a win as a win – it’s all up to personal choice.  I feel as if the best way for our great jiu-jitsu community to come together is to drop the classifications and stereotypes and egos and to simply accept one another’s personal goals for what they are.  There is no reason to badmouth someone who works from 50/50 – if you don’t like it, then figure out a way to improve yourself and defeat it, not bring someone else down.

  If you have a differing opinion, leave your comments at the bottom!