I’m not a giant in the jiu-jitsu industry, but I’ve been writing about and working in the sport for as long as I’ve been training—over 10 years now. I’ve written books with big names. I’ve traveled to cover events, both MMA and jiu-jitsu. I opened and ran a satellite jiu-jitsu gym (and closed it too when it failed). I run Artechoke Media, a jiu-jitsu publishing house, and my business partner Matt Kirtley and I help jiu-jitsu brands with their marketing.I tell you all of this in the hopes that you take my thoughts on starting a jiu-jitsu business more seriously because I’ve heard lines like this too often (and these are as close to direct quotes as my memory will...

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Last week, I turned 30. That puts me at more than 10 years in the sport, maybe 12 years if you count watching Cesar Gracie DVDs and fighting my friends in the backyard as training. A lot changes in 10 years. Beyond the normal existential crisis of getting older, aging in jiu-jitsu is a nuanced challenge. I’ve never been a super athlete, but what my body was able to do at 20 is very different from what my body can do at 30. No more rubber guard. Heck, I can’t do a triangle choke without my knees exploding. But accumulating a collection of injuries isn’t the hardest part of aging in jiu-jitsu years. One of the things the community doesn’t...

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  A new year is upon us, and in gyms around the world a new crowd of well-intentioned members are getting memberships and trying to make a change in their life. Jiu-jitsu schools across the country will see an influx as well. While the jokes about how poorly these life changes go for the resolution crowd are painfully accurate, someone trying BJJ for the first time—regardless of the reason—is a huge opportunity for your school and for your team. Instead of looking down on the resolution crowd, give them the welcome and support they might need to stick with the sport when that new gi smells wears off. Let’s start with some empathy. Once you’ve training jiu-jitsu for a year...

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  The jiu-jitsu world is rich with instructionals, and in the early years, swapping bootleg VHS tapes and tattered magazine techniques—many of which were in Japanese or Portuguese—was the only way schools in remote locations could get new techniques. In those years, remote meant any non-major city that doesn’t have a beach. Today, instructionals are readily available—books, DVDs, magazines, YouTube, webinars, and subscription sites. At the same time, instruction in schools has vastly improved. Seminars are far more accessible. Most schools are run by black belts. Finding an instructor with a large breadth of knowledge isn’t as hard as it used to be, but the instructional industry is still booming. The formats might be different, but we are still seeing...

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When jiu-jitsu tourism was sort of my job, I was in Hawaii training at the BJ Penn Academy. I was still new to the sport, working on getting a blue belt, which meant that I was simply too fresh to understand some of the sport’s biggest challenges. As a white belt, I thought that the hardest parts of jiu-jitsu were things like training consistently, or getting in shape, or having to get used to upper belts beating up on you. Then I met Sam (not his real name). Sam was a local, late 30s, and barely taller than five feet. He was comically round and almost always laughed, mostly at himself. Technically, Sam was a blue belt, but he had...

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Hitting a training rut is one of the inevitabilities of jiu-jitsu. If you stay on the mat long enough, you will eventually hit a plateau, and the worst of plateaus will make you feel like you are moving backward. You won’t know why. You’ll be training as hard as usual. You’ll be at every class. And you’ll just feel lackluster. After a few weeks, you see your training partners start to outmatch you at every turn.Training ruts can become like quicksand, dragging you and your morale to a dark and frustrating place.Whether you’re in a rut now or are prepping for when the day will come, here are the steps you need to take (based on my 10 years in...

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Raf Esparza, one of the hosts of Verbal Tap Cast, reached out to me the other day with a question. He said, “You’re a BJJ Historian (of sorts).” That sort of half-compliment is on par with our usual banter, but I digress. He continued, “Have you ever seen s*** talking like this?”Esparza was referring to the apparent increase in trash talk between jiu-jitsu athletes. We have Gordon Ryan doing the jiu-jitsu equivalent of a “send all” email for issuing challenge matches. We had AJ Agazarm takeover the Metamoris Instagram account earlier this year. We had Saulo Ribeiro replying to one of John Danaher’s Instagram novels, questioning his authority on BJJ competition. And of course Garry Tonon jumped in the fray...

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In jiu-jitsu, we frequently—if not relentlessly—talk about the importance of having knowledgeable and engaged instructors and the power of having committed and talented training partners. An instructor helps you to uncover blind spots and learn new techniques, while your training partners force you to test and retest your game, forging your skills as a jiu-jiteiro. Despite the known importance of good instruction, as a sport we have a tendency to equate talented competitors with talented instructors. On the other side of that coin, we have a tendency to evaluate a jiu-jiteiro’s skill (or even their worth) by how well they can roll against us. Are there exceptions to this generalization? Sure, but I can’t help but see that the most...

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The poor retention rate of jiu-jitsu is notorious at this point. We talk about it so much that we sometimes seem proud of the fact that the majority of white belts won’t make it to blue, and that the majority of those people won’t make it to purple, and so on and so on until we have a handful of weirdos left sticking it out through black belt.Though we might puff our chests at how difficult our sport can be, in the dark lonely hours of a poorly attended open mat, while we wait against the wall for a roll, our minds might drift back through all of the faces of the people that came and went. We remember the...

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