Newsletter from Rickson Gracie’s Jiu-Jitsu Global Federation offers wisdom for students training Jiu-Jitsu.
“When you spar during training, you should minimize your natural talent. By limiting yourself, you may find yourself in a much worse situation, but you are forced to think your way out, using techniques you would not have otherwise used. When you start doing this, you begin to understand what is really wrong in a certain situation and you begin to understand what actually needs to be done in a technical way in order to improve the situation. You then begin to develop real, deep progress, understanding the mechanics of any situation.”
“You don’t learn when you are fighting, bringing in all sorts of tension and emotion. You learn when you are having fun, training in a smooth and gentle way. You need to work on improving your technique until you are comfortable in any situation. Eventually, you will develop a subconscious understanding of the techniques and they become reflexes. Only after you have done all this you are ready to take your natural abilities ‘off the shelf’ and add them back into your game. Now the effectiveness of the technique will be at least ten times better.”
