5 Death Grips & Wrist Lock Defenses
Grip and wrist health are critical to jiu-jitsu. In this new blog, Shawna Rodgers shares a yoga perspective on staying in peak form.
Promises to Keep
In his new blog, Marshal writes how a small note to himself got him through hard training times and why he's coming back to that practice today.
10 Things to Stop Doing at BJJ (A Picture Guide)
Meet John Q. Whitebelt. He's your everyday BJJ white belt. John does a lot of stuff wrong -- he is just a white belt after all. But you can learn from John's mistakes. Here are 10 things John does that you should not do at class.
A Reflection on 10 Years of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
In October, I passed the ten-year mark for my BJJ career. As cliche as it sounds, I feel like I was a white belt yesterday, but as I look around, the friends I came up with are mostly black belts now or stopped training altogether...
The Illusion of the Super Athlete Upper Belt
Chris Henriques was a purple belt when I was a white belt. A tattoo artist and professional fighter, Chris was tough-looking in that he had tattoos up his scalp and a fight record to match, but he had a Hawaiian smile and a friendly melody to his speech. A regular at many of the noon classes I attended, he often had the patience to be my partner and the kindness to answer my questions before and after training. Chris was nice to me, but spider guard was not.For an entire month we drilled spider guard, starting class with the same set of fundamental spider guard movements and drills. The hardest movement drill—a sort of forward shrimping where you alternate extending...
Game Sense in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
Thanks to Black Friday deals, I built a new PC and started playing Overwatch, the team-based competitive shooter. While I’m still a dirty scrub at that game, I have enjoyed looking into the world of professional players to pick up tips. A concept that comes up frequently is “game sense,” and it has applications to BJJ that I want to talk about here. Stick with me even if you're not a gamer -- it will be worth it. Game sense is the ability to understand the current state of the game and predict what the opponents are going to do so you can act accordingly. Your mechanical skills are your aim, movement, positioning, reflexes, etc., while game sense is the...
A year in review
The end of the year is here, and it has been a wild one for Inverted Gear, so I thought we could look back at some of the highlights of 2017. We continued to grow and broke our sales record for the fifth year in a row. We sponsored tournaments all over the world, our sponsored team competed at every major IBJJF tournament, we branched out and sponsored the US combat wrestling team, and we continued our partnerships with Tap Cancer Out, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Globetrotters, Show the Art, and Rdojo. After visiting our friends in Guam in 2016, we were excited to work with them and sponsor the Marianas open, one of the most underrated tournaments out there. Once a year,...
Geeking out on Teaching Jiu-Jitsu: How Instructional Design Tools Can Enhance Your Classes
One of the many hats I wear says “instructional designer” on it. Instructional design is the process of creating and coordinating all the moving parts (content, interactions, expectations, assignments, assessment) of a given learning experience (e.g., a college course, an ethics course required by all employees of a law firm) to increase the likelihood that learners will be engaged and successful. It is a long-standing field, but it has become more popular since more and more different types of institutions have moved toward putting their content online to reduce overhead and attract more geographically diverse learners. There is an art and a science to instructional design. Some of it can be tedious, but some of it is pretty cool, and...
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Two Poses for Happier Hamstrings
When you think of places that hurt after a long day of training, hamstrings aren’t always the first to come to mind, but you should be aware of how tight hamstrings can affect the rest of your body. Having tight hamstrings can greatly contribute to knee and lower back pain as well as limit hip mobility, which can lead to discomfort and an increased risk of injury. Visualize your hamstrings as rubber bands that run between the hip and the knee, which end up pulling and putting tension on the knees, hips, back, and rest of your body when they are overly tight. When you work to loosen the hamstrings, the effects can be felt widespread throughout the body and...
Separating Knowledge from Physical Gifts
A meniscus (cartilage in the knee) repair, partial removal, or total removal may increase one’s risk of osteoarthritis and therefore likelihood of needing a total knee replacement. The number of patient who will experience permanent, chronic pain after a hernia repair (using medical mesh) is at least 4% by the most conservative estimates and as high as 45% according to some studies. These are my two largest health issues, one hernia repair and four meniscus surgeries later. In addition to the standard assortment of jiu-jiteiro nagging injuries—turf toe, occasional rib issues, sore knuckles, and a strained lower back—my health plays a huge factor in how I train. At 30-years-old, I am young by most standards, but I was not gifted...