Years ago, I read an article about video game development at Valve Software, the makers of Half-Life and Left 4 Dead, that changed how I value the feedback I get as an instructor. In the interview, Valve game developers talked about how they changed how they do playtesting. Initially, a Valve employee would sit down with a playtester and have them give live commentary as they played the game. This lead to a lot of animated and exaggerated reactions by the player and lively interactions with the observer. The Valve observer would finish the session feeling like it was productive, but the data collected was often too superficial and did not reflect how a player would play the game on...

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After I had been teaching jiu-jitsu for a while, a twenty-something man started coming to my classes. He had never trained before, but he had somehow decided he knew a lot already—shades of the Dunning-Kruger effect plus, I’m guessing, YouTube. From the get-go, he had a habit of telling his training partners how to do techniques (usually incorrectly) and asking questions that seemed less about clarification and more about proving what he knew and what I did not. I tried to be patient with him, letting him know I was happy to work with him but asking him to stop being disruptive in class. He would either laugh or stare at me, and then during the next class he would...

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  I borrowed the title for this blog post from a video game podcast that faded into inactivity far too soon. Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I often encountered a pervasive cultural idea of video games being a waste of time, and that all of his kids playing Nintendo and Sega Genesis would eventually have to put aside childish things and grow up. Oddly enough, I’ve encountered similar reactions to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. When my injuries started to pile up, my family assumed that I would be stepping away from the sport for good. I had relationships—romantic and otherwise—where the person on the other end also assumed that there would be an ending point for my weird pajama...

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Recently I was invited to create a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructional. This was actually the second time I got the invitation. The first was probably about two years ago, and my response to that first invitation was, “What do I possibly have to share that hasn’t already been shared countless times?” I reasoned that everything I had learned had been taught to me by teachers who knew the movements better than I did and had more experience teaching. Why not ask them?When it comes to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I have a chronic case of Impostor Syndrome. (Who am I fooling? I have Impostor Syndrome in most areas of my life.) I assume everybody at my level knows much more than I do...

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Starting Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu can be a bewildering and socially awkward experience. You are dropped into a new culture with all its own rules and traditions. To ease some of that tension, I have written answers to a few of the most common questions that beginners ask. Does it matter what color gi I buy? Check your school’s rules, but a white gi is always a safe bet. Blue is normally fine too. Black is probably OK but some new students worry it will draw too much attention. The reasons to check with your school first are that some require white gis or require you to buy a school gi. More liberal BJJ associations like the BJJ Globetrotters allow everyone to...

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