Last week was the five-year anniversary of my promotion to black belt, and next month marks my thirteenth year in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on my journey through BJJ, how it has evolved, and share what training and teaching is like as a black belt. Here are the personal projects I have worked on since earning my black belt: Learning the modern leglock game. Interest in leglocks, especially heelhooks, has exploded with the popularity of events like EBI with alternative rulesets. I always liked IBJJF-legal straight ankle locks, but with Nelson’s influence, I have joined Team Reap. For the past two years, I have attended Reilly Bodycomb’s 3-day RDojo winter leglock camps. Nelson is...

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I got my black belt three years ago. For the first and second anniversaries of earning my black belt, I wrote blog posts about what I had learned in year one and year two. Time flies, but Panda Nation seems to enjoy hearing about my black belt adventures and just how much learning occurs after black belt. So here’s the third edition!My training has been inconsistent. Hillary and I have been traveling a ton for camps and seminars and a bunch of stuff in between. Sometimes we only come home for a week or two before heading out again. My time at my “home gym” has been minimal, so I haven’t gotten to spend as much time in the lab...

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The other day I was talking with a student who had recently competed for the first time. He recounted how anxious he was as he waited to compete, how fast he started to experience the adrenaline dump so common for inexperienced competitors once his match started, and how frustrating it was not to be able to apply his game effectively (he lost via a collar choke at about the 3-minute mark). “It really exposed some of my shortcomings,” he said. I started thinking about the concept of exposure and how often it is linked in my mind with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I can share countless times during my jiu-jitsu career when I felt completely exposed—embarrassed, frustrated, frightened, anxious, disappointed—because of something...

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Early in our jiu-jitsu careers, we tend to have a problem and solution mindset, and this view of jiu-jitsu is actually pretty narrow. For example, you might get stuck in a headlock a lot, so you ask your instructors (or YouTube) for the solution. This thinking continues as you encounter new positions. What do I do when his legs are like this and my arms like this? Boom, another solution.And then something weird happens. You run into someone that uses a different solution to solve the exact same problem.When I was teaching three or four times a week, this got to be problematic because I was not a black belt, and right after teaching a move I’d sometimes hear, “Well...

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We are constantly talking about optimizing our learning. We want to squeeze out every ounce of progress from every moment on the mats. The Inverted Gear blog is full of articles about doing just that, and I have written many of them. What can be lost in that conversation is a realistic, healthy perspective on the detours and setbacks that are unavoidable (and maybe even necessary). Your progress will not be a smooth, straight line upwards. We may like to think someone who has trained twice as long is also twice as good, but that’s not how real life works. Different people learn at different speeds. The longer you train, the slower you improve. Some skills come fast, others come...

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The Panda Nation has many awesome citizens, like black belt Frederico Silva, who we introduced in the previous installment of Meet the Pandas. Today, we like to show what drives Kyvann ‘Guapinho’ Jimenez: purple belt competition monster, former bone breaking skateboarder, and videographer extraordinary. Purple belt Kyvann Jimenez (26) was dragged into jiu-jitsu kicking and screaming by his dad. After years of skateboarding and Muay Thai, that ground-fighting stuff just seemed silly. But once ‘Guapinho’ (a nickname for ‘little handsome guy’) finally got obsessed with the art after an unexpected tournament win, he went on a dominant winning spree, while at the same time working a fulltime job and graduating from college. So, you didn’t think jiu-jitsu would work? Kyvann...

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As I train more and more and I get a better idea of what “my game” is, I find myself using a similar principle more often. I like to call it “funneling.” What I mean when I use this term is getting to certain positions that dramatically reduce my opponent’s options. Since I am familiar with the positions, I can react accordingly, and I will pick positions where I feel I have the advantage, whether that advantage is mechanical or simply a matter of my being more experienced with the position. It all started with closed guard. I was tired of being triangled and swept by one of my main training partners from his closed guard. I realized that while...

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A friend of mine is a physical therapist. He has years of experience helping people recover from trauma that causes them discomfort and limits their ranges of motion. He has tons of suggestions for strengthening muscles, improving stability, and reducing pain, all based on current theory and best practice. He is highly recommended by area surgeons and osteopaths, and on any given day, he is swamped with clients who want the best care for themselves or their loved ones. Because we are friends, I bust his chops on a regular basis, pretending to get annoyed with him when he recommends a particularly odious weightlifting rep scheme or joking that if he ran a truly full-service operation, he would do my...

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As a character trait, being stubborn is usually considered negative. Someone who is stubborn insists on a path no matter what, sometimes in the face of overwhelming opposition. They grit their teeth and refuse to be swayed.In jiu-jitsu—and in sports in general—a certain kind of stubbornness is mandatory to achieve success. If you are not willing to fail repeatedly until you get it right, you will likely find it difficult to progress, especially as your competition gets tougher and tougher. To learn, and to grow, you have to be willing to believe that a technique or a move can work for you and hold that belief over a long stretch of training and through countless screw ups.Here’s an example: Christian...

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In an ideal world, we would all train at a place like Marcelo Garcia’s academy in New York City or Art of Jiu-Jitsu in California with a multiple-time world champion coach and plenty of world caliber training partners. But what if you live some place more remote, and the nearest black belt is hours away? How can you improve when your only training partners are a blue belt and a bunch of white belts? Are you destined to spend your time in a car driving for hours every time you want to train? This situation is more common than you think. When you live in southern California or anywhere near New York City, believing that there are places in the...

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