Flowing with the Go (5 page)

8
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu 101

W
hen you think of “martial arts,” what comes to mind? Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee fending off entire gangs of miscreants? Samurai with their topknot hairdos and mighty swords? A park lawn dotted with senior citizens peacefully executing the katas of tai chi? A guy in a white uniform breaking boards with his bare hand? Or perhaps turtles cloaked in black, hurling throwing stars and swinging nunchuks?

Many cultures have a martial arts tradition. The oldest martial arts are believed to have originated as long ago as 3,000 BC in Korea and China. Many styles that are practiced today have not changed significantly since their inception. Each style differs in its external movements, but all of the martial arts embrace the axiom of a spiritual endeavor.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), being rather young, has a distinct and traceable path. It is believed by some that Japanese old-style Jujutsu, an unarmed form of combat used by samurai, is the parent martial art of BJJ. In 1915, Japanese immigrant Esai Maeda taught the skills of Japanese Jujutsu to Carlos Gracie in Brazil. Carlos continued to teach the Japanese art and established the first Gracie Jiu-Jitsu academy in Rio de Janeiro in 1925. Helio, Carlos's younger brother, was fascinated by the sport, but was restricted from practicing the techniques due to his small size and fragile frame.

Determined to participate, Helio refined and adapted the Japanese-style art he spent years observing. His goals were to make Jiu-Jitsu more suitable to his lack of strength and smaller size by developing techniques that employed leverage, timing, and coordinated body movements. In 1928, together with his brother Carlos, they took an existing martial art and advanced it into what we now refer to as BJJ.

BJJ can be practiced by just about anyone; Helio Gracie is the original example of this. You will see a variety of body types in a BJJ class: tall, petite, robust, lean, sturdy, buffed, and scrawny. You will see participants of all ages: kids as young as four years old, teens, adults, and masters. Helio Gracie was still competing in his fifties.

Most of BJJ happens after a match or altercation is taken to the ground. This is what makes BJJ distinguishable from other martial arts. The main focus is often referred to as the “ground game.” The techniques of BJJ focus on the principles of leverage, balance, and timing, allowing those of smaller stature or limited athletic ability to defend themselves against larger and stronger opponents. The art of BJJ is comprised of many sweeps, reversals, chokes, arm locks, and leg locks.

A typical training session at a BJJ gym has three phases and begins with the students lining up by rank to face and bow to the instructor, who is often a black belt in the art. First, the students are led through a warmup beginning with jogging and some general conditioning exercises, such as push-ups, squats, burpees, and core work. Next, the students practice movements that are foundational to many BJJ techniques: shrimping, technical stand-ups, shoulder rolls, and bridging. By this point, the average person's heart rate will have risen and the sweating would have started, just in time to start learning a new technique.

During the second phase, a new technique, or two, is taught to the students. A skillful instructor will demonstrate the technique step by step and explain just enough nuances for the students to be successful but not overwhelmed. Students then partner up and drill. For people new to the sport, this can be the awkward part. It is during drill that you must get up-close-and-personal with another student. If you have a strong resistance to people entering your personal bubble, this sport will not be for you. Depending upon the technique, you may have someone sitting on top of you, have their legs wrapped around your waist, or have their face very close to your crotch or other oftconsidered private place. BJJ is an excellent catalyst for personal hygiene.

Drilling in BJJ is critical to success. The initial stages of learning the art can be very frustrating. BJJ is complex. Anyone with longevity in the sport has most certainly had their patience tested several times. There are myriad techniques and details to master, and people who expect to be good right away typically do not last. A student who finds excitement in the creativity and challenge of each technique will return time and time again. Instructors of the art relish the veritable opportunity within BJJ to develop new transitions, technique variations, countermeasures, and submissions. BJJ is a dynamic sport that continues to grow and change.

A training session usually ends with sparring. Sparring allows the student to practice the techniques with near-100% resistance without “pulling any punches,” so to speak. If a student is caught in a choke, armlock, or leg lock, they simply tap out and continue training injury free. This allows the student to practice the techniques in a life-like situation so they can be confident that they would recall a technique in a real self-defense or competitive situation.

Although the main focus of BJJ is self-defense, the style has also grown into an extremely popular sport. BJJ competitions are held across the world with the major events registering thousands of competitors. The competitions are often referred to as “Sport BJJ” tournaments and should not be confused with mixed martial arts (MMA) events.

Sport BJJ matches start similar to a wrestling or Judo match, with both competitors standing and working for the takedown or other technique to get the match to the ground. As with many other sports, there is a set of rules in place to keep the athletes safe. There is also a point system, though the ultimate victory is to force your opponent to submit, often referred to as “tapping out,” using a variety of submission holds. Athletes compete based upon the criteria of weight, rank, age, and gender. Because there are far fewer woman who compete, we most often do not have the luxury of age divisions.

BJJ is also an integral part of a modern-day MMA competitor's skill set. BJJ for MMA differs slightly from Sport BJJ because of additional strikes and the lack of a uniform. However, the fundamental escapes, submissions, counters, and reversals comprise a large part of most of the top MMA athlete's ground game today. It's important to note that the modern-day MMA athlete needs to be well versed in all areas, and there is no single style that is the best for all situations.

9
White Belt Blues

“T
he theme of the white belt is survival, nothing more, nothing less,” says Saulo Ribeiro in
Jiu-Jitsu University.
This author describes a white belt as an empty vessel with no one against which to compare oneself. Everyone begins Jiu-Jitsu as a white belt. My belt felt
really
white. Before a white belt can move on, they must become a survivor. Ribeiro describes the white-belt level as the time when a student's insecurity and patience will be tested. White belts do not have a lot of skill yet, but if they are smart and focus on their defense and knowledge, they can survive. Ribeiro's words are a poignant complement to the last four years of my life, as I struggled to survive the anguish of my daughter's sudden death.

When I started rolling, I was damaged goods. I had a broken heart, low confidence, and high anxiety; I didn't believe I was worth my time. After a couple of weeks of Jiu-Jitsu, I was even more damaged— physically. I popped a rib cartilage learning to “escape from mount,” and it hurt to cough, laugh, and . . . well, breathe. But I had committed in my mind to a year, so I wrapped my ribs in a six-inch-wide bandage and told myself that when I healed, I seriously needed to work on my core. I still wanted to go in—even with the injury—because the gym had become part of my routine. My parents called it therapeutic (this made me smirk at the time). I looked forward to my Thursday night to myself, when I could work up a good cleansing sweat. My dear friend Kelly liked to tell everyone I was a cage fighter. She also thought it was funny to ask me, loudly, in public places, “How is your BJ (long pause) J class going?” Very funny. I had to keep telling everyone I was not a cage fighter and my husband that I only rolled with women (heh heh). No one really cared why I was going. Already they were seeing a difference in me that I could not yet see in myself. Apparently I was in recovery, but I was the last to know.

One of my other early BJJ injuries was to my shoulder. A big Samoan guy put me in a keylock/Americana (see Jiu-Jitsu University, page 330) with a bit too much enthusiasm. My shoulder was painful to use for a couple of weeks. But things were going okay, and I was able to participate mostly using my other arm—that is, until we sparred. I was set to spar with a strong and experienced guy. I asked him to watch my shoulder, and I was having difficulty doing moves. He made the remark, “You shouldn't be here.”

I was devastated and bolted out of the gym as soon as class ended, trying not to cry. Of course my wounded state of mind was telling me that he was right.
What was I doing there? I couldn't do it. I'm hurt
and I'm not any good and I'm a wussy because I'm crying.
I should have been captain of the negative self-talk team. By this time in my grief journey, I was an expert at driving while crying, so I started to leave the parking lot when I heard the beep that indicated I had a text. It was Coach asking me if I was okay. “No!” I replied, and I texted him my tale of woe and how unfriendly “that guy” was.

Of course, it turned out that the guy merely meant that I should stay home and take care of my arm until it is healed. But I was at this overly sensitive time in my life, and beating up on myself was the only fight I knew I could win.

10
Coach and His Guns

C
oach James Foster, “Coach,” is an imposing physical force. He is six foot five and weighs 255 pounds. His biceps are “licensed to carry” (i.e., guns), and he has other muscles that barely fit under his gi. He has the overtly masculine ability to be clean-shaven at the morning class and have a full beard by the evening class. Coach has a calm and soothing instructional voice, but there is a tone he can dial into that triggers a fight-or-flight response. It is the tone that most often accompanies the command “move!” Some of my teammates and I haven't forgotten the youngster in the li'l tykes class (ages four to six) being carried out the door by his father, bawling because Coach wouldn't give him a star sticker after class. “You were not paying attention in line, so no star today.” Yikes. Can you see why even big-time fighters find him intimidating? I would cry too if I didn't get a star.

Coach started his martial arts training at the age of ten, when he began practicing a style of Karate called Aam-Ka-Jutsu. He studied Aam-Ka-Jutsu for nine years and holds the rank of a first-degree black belt. While watching the UFC, he saw how the use of Jiu-Jitsu skills benefited the most dominant fighters. The athlete who caught his eye was Royce Gracie of the infamous Gracie family. Because BJJ was a rather obscure sport at the time, Coach and some of his equally-as-intrigued Karate black-belt friends, including ToDD, who you will read about later, began to decipher BJJ on their own. Coach recalls his less than enthusiastic Karate master telling him that BJJ was a fad, “just like Kung-Fu was in the ‘70s. In a couple of years, it'll be gone.”

Resources for do-it-yourself Jiu-Jitsu were sparse. Coach and his buddies relied on one book and VHS tapes of Royce Gracie's UFC fights to reverse-engineer what they were seeing into physical maneuvers on the mat. (In contrast, if you google Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu today, you will get 1,440,000 hits.) In compliance with his oft-compulsive behavior, Coach became so obsessed with BJJ that he eventually left the Karate school to study BJJ full-time. He was nineteen. After many years of training and several years of teaching BJJ out of other gyms, Coach opened his own gym location in July 2007.

Fast forward to present day, and Foster Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has grown to become one of top BJJ schools in the state of Washington, with one of the largest facilities dedicated to the art form.

In addition to teaching, Coach trained as a competitor. Although he has won many medals, he cites his 2006 and 2007 bronze medals from the Pan Jiu-Jitsu Championships, where he competed as a black belt, as major accomplishments.

I'm sure that, along his Jiu-Jitsu journey, Coach has spent time in tutelage of some of the great masters of our day: Mr. Miyagi, Obi-Wan, Gandalf, Professor X, and Homer Simpson all come to mind.

Coach is wise and compassionate. Once (or thrice) when noticing that I was getting watery eyes and on the verge of crumbling, he didn't roll his eyes or ignore me. Instead he looked at me askance with his eyes focused down and to the right, which is the neurolinguistic sign that a person is having an internal dialogue. Without the use of extrasensory perception, I could hear that dialogue as, “Gosh, I've seen that look before. The last time my wife was about to have a breakdown, what did I do that worked?” And I could see his mind churning through his Rolodex of “male responses to irrational female emotions” until he settled on just the right thing to say.

Coach is one of the most genuine people that I know. When you are due a hug, he gives you a real hug, not a lame side-hug. He is a role model for integrity and passion. When he couldn't get what he wanted from BJJ in the area, he took himself elsewhere to train. He returned to generously and enthusiastically share his newly acquired knowledge, just as he does today. He is a student of the art. In his denial of a star sticker to the young Padawan, Coach taught a greater lesson: that you must honor his expectations and the discipline of martial arts. Both coach and learner must not compromise. To practice compromise in the gym will lead you to compromise with yourself in life, and we must always expect to give our best.