Professor Chris Hauter, one of the "Dirty Dozen" the first twelve American Black Belts has an adage that means a lot to me. Over the next month I will explore these themes.
Think Street, Train Sport, Practice Art.
Think Street. Almost all of us started jiu jitsu to learn how to defend themselves. The best way to do this is incorporate striking into your live grappling. I keep a bin of mma gloves at the gym to do this. The mystery is, whenever I break out the mma gloves regularly in class attendance drops by 50%. I get it. The intensity steps up, you lose your sense of security, striking negates many elements of sport jiu jitsu. I am thus incentivized as a coach to not break out the mitts. However, as a coach it is my job to push student's boundaries of what they think they are capable of and what they are comfortable with.
I have a student that I do private lessons with. Over the last six months we have focused on making him durable. We focus heavily on learning to frame, when and how to move, when to take risks and when to be conservative. One of the first rules we have covered is "NOTHING EVER TOUCHES YOUR HEAD" this rule really comes into play when we start striking. There is an old adage common in jiu jitsu: take a black belt and hit him in the head he turns into a brown belt and so forth. I have seen this play out many times. Something in our human programming takes over and our fight or flight systems engage. Heart rate increases, breath does not flow, we try and answer every challenge with strength. The only way to decrease those reactions is by exposing ourselves to those high stress situations. We also put the mitts on once a month during those private lessons. Since we have done so this students' performance in sport jiu jitsu classes has skyrocketed. His priorities have shifted from not knowing what choice to make to nothing ever touches my head. The interesting part is that because he is doing that, he is able to move his body much more freely.
This is one small lesson from "Think Street" We will continue to examine this further next week.
