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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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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As Hillary and I were headed to Australia to meet our friend Chad and teach a few seminars, Winter Storm Stella was scheduled to hit the east coast. Our flight out of Philly was cancelled, which made us scramble to get new a flight. We decided our best option was driving to Pittsburgh, staying with friends, and flying out of there the following morning. 24 hours later, we returned our one-way rental and headed to the gate. Along the way, this book caught my attention. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. A few flights, layovers, and whiskey and sodas later I am about halfway through the book, and I can’t help but start to draw comparisons to...

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Five years ago, I started Inverted Gear. It seems like yesterday I was ordering polybags and halfsheet labels on Amazon so I could ship the first batch of panda gis from my mom’s basement. A lot has changed since then. First of all, I met my wife and business partner, Hillary. I didn’t know how much I needed her until she saw our original design files that were sent to the factory. Here is a side by side for comparison, so you can perhaps get a sense of the potential she saw on the brand. vs With Hillary’s help, Inverted Gear has grown into something incredible.I’m still amazed when I scroll through social media and get to experience panda sightings....

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I got to visit a lot of schools over the last 10 years. While every school is different, I feel they all tend to fall into three categories: traditional, formal, and informal. Before I go into my criteria for these categories or why I'm even making these distinctions, I want to point out how interesting it is that the same sport—we all do the same thing, wrestle in pajamas—can produce a wide spectrum of school and teaching styles. The amount of rules and customs some schools choose to follow can be completely foreign to a student from an informal school, and a student who has known nothing but the structure of a formal school can be equally as lost at...

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I am getting close to my 10 year anniversary with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Over the last year, I finally changed my mindset of how I look at my training, and started to think about longevity. I remember being a twenty-year-old white belt, training like a madman, often tapping too late, or barely getting out of submissions I should have tapped to. Older guys in the room would just shake their heads at me and tell me do it while you can. Of course I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Then I turned 28, and suddenly all those little injuries from hard training and competing suddenly would not go away. It's a completely different game once you turn 30. My knees, specifically...

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We need to talk about the berimbolo metagame, and we can look at how other competitions handle balance and metagame for some ideas of how to introduce more variety of grappling styles into competition.Street fighter II debuted 26 years ago. I have memories from the early 90’sof asking my mom for change so my sister and I could go down the street and play at this little arcade next to the corner store. It only had 4 or 5 machines, but the only one that mattered was Street Fighter. I got many blisters trying to master the hadouken, and this was before strategy guides or widespread internet access for that matter. When you discovered a special move, it was your...

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I played three different sports throughout high school – wrestling, track, and football – and I was fortunate to have amazing coaches in all three. Our football games (the kind with egg-shaped ball for our non-US readers) were on Friday night. On Monday, we reviewed footage of the game as a team. During one of our film study sessions, we analyzed our opponent’s scoring plays from the last game. A new formation had confused one of our defensive players and he “froze up,” unsure where to go, and he stood still for a moment too long, reacting too late, and giving the other team enough space to score. Our coach said, “I’d rather have you make a mistake at full...

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20-year-old me, Happy birthday! In a few days you will head to Hooters with your friends to watch UFC 79. Besides the epic war that Silva vs Liddell will be, GSP’s win by armbar will plant the MMA and submission grappling bug in your head (spoiler alert, I guess). In a few months your friend Dave will talk you into signing up for a tournament and your life will forever be changed. You will train and compete as often as you can. Everything in your life will begin to go through the “how does this affect my jiu-jitsu filter.” It will seem strange to a lot of your family and friends, but it will make you immensely happy, so stay...

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It’s that time of the year. A few weeks ago in the United States, families gathered on a special Thursday to celebrate each other and what their thankful for in their lives. But the Friday that follows is just as important. No, I’m not talking about Black Friday shopping. The day after Thanksgiving marks the start of winter sports for high schoolers in the US. For me, that means one thing: Wrestling season. I wrestled for two years in high school. Spoiler alert: I wasn’t very good. I somehow managed to have an above .500 record and make it out of our district to compete in regionals. Even though I didn’t walk away from high school wrestling with a bunch...

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