“Paul, I hope you can give an OG some advice. I tore my knee up (new ACL and badly torn meniscus) last September and will soon be released to return to the mats. I’m nervous about what I will be able to do and how it will change my game. Any ideas you have would be greatly appreciated?”
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TWG: I had to deal with the exact same situation after my knee surgery and know exactly what issues you’re going to encounter with your return to the mat:
1. You’re going to have a huge mental block that’s waiting to see if your new knee is going to break once you return to training. Your mind will be fixated on every ounce of contact made with your leg, things that happen regularly training that you didn’t even pay attention to before the surgery. You’ll focus on it less and less once you get used to being back on the mat and see that the knee is ok.
2. When you return back to the mat, you’re going to favor and overprotect that knee for a long time (or at least until you feel comfortable enough to stop thinking about during training). You’ll be very sensitive to any contact or twisting that happens to your knee during training, whether it’s a natural movement or not. If the doctor did a good job repairing the knee, it should hold up fine in
practice as long as you take it easy.
3. Work into the warm-ups and technical drills slowly. DO NOT SPAR WITH ANYONE FOR A FEW WEEKS, regardless of how tempting it will be! Many grapplers get caught up in this trap because their enthusiasm and getting stuck on how good they were before surgery causes them to jump back too quickly, running the risk of damaging what was fixed during surgery.
4. If you been given an athletic knee brace from your doctor, use it at all times while training until you feel comfortable that you can actually train without it. If they didn’t give you one, go and buy a good brace to wear during training. That brace will provide you extra protection, both physically and mentally.
5. You have to select your partners very carefully while you’re on the road back to recovery. This will probably be another OG or senior student that understands that you’re coming back from an injury. Make sure that everyone that you drill techniques with understands that you are recovering from surgery and that light drilling is all you’re going to do for the first month.
6. Expect that some students in your class will view your return after a layoff as an opportunity to smash an easy target during sparring matches. If you were performing better than some of your teammates prior to surgery, some will be tempted to show you how much they’ve “improved” since you’ve been gone. It happened to me after my knee surgery when one of my junior classmates made a point to tap me my first week back on the mat. Not only did he rough me up after being off the mat for months, he told me “no one needs to know what just happened” after the match, right before he went to the locker room to tell another teammate what he had done.
7. Make sure to ice your knee down after each class for the first few weeks, especially if you feel any soreness after training.
If you take it slow with getting back on the mat, listen to your knee when it tells you to slow down or stop, and avoid guys that’ll try to kneebar your newly reconstructed knee, you should be fine.
In Part 1 of the “6 BJJ Mat Tips” article, I covered Mat Tips 1-3 (Don’t allow your opponent to get their grips, Keep your opponents head in front of their hips, and how to get into your opponent’s
“blind spot” by using angled attacks).
In Part 2, I will cover the remaining Mat Tips (#4-6) for improving your closed guard attacks:
Tip #4: Your hands must always make contact with your opponent at all times while in your guard – Far too often during a match, a grappler will establish a control grip on his opponent, then release it due to fatigue or frustration from not knowing what to do from that position. Once you break contact with your opponent and put your hands somewhere that’s not helping you during the match (e.g. behind the back of your head), you make it easier for your opponent to maintain the posture they need to eventually pass your guard.
Tip #5: Break your opponent’s base by “Driving Their Head” – Everyone has heard at one time or another to pull your opponent’s head down to your chest, but the reason why you’re doing it isn’t
always clear. Usually, grapplers pull their opponents forward to break their posture, but once you pull them forward, their immediate reaction will be to sit back up, with no benefit from pulling them down. But what if you steered your opponent’s head by turning it like you’d turn a car steering wheel? You would force them to break their own base while trying to free their head from your grip, making it easier to sweep them on one side while creating space on the other side to escape from underneath them.
Tip #6: Transition from closed to open guard BEFORE your opponent’s breaks your guard AND attack immediately – Most grapplers have heard that you shouldn’t wait until your guard is broken before you move to the next position (which tends to be open guard). Unfortunately, many grapplers transition too slowly from closed to open guard. That immediate closed-to-open guard transition should allow you to stay one step ahead of your opponent, making it easier to counter their attacks since they’re still concentrating on opening your legs to pass your guard.
And there you have the “6 BJJ Mat Tip to Improve Your Closed Guard Attacks.” Make sure that you master these tips and don’t get discouraged if your guard gets passed while trying to perfect
these tactics. With patience and persistence, you’ll have one of the most feared closed guard attacks at your academy.
Well, it’s the last day of 2010 and I’m sitting here thinking about the past year and all the “highs and lows” that I’ve encountered.
And as I reflect back on the year, I can’t help but to put things into three buckets: the good, the bad and the ugly.
The “good” bucket consists of all my successes for the year. The things that I tried and everything turned out in my favor. I guess it should go without saying this is my favorite bucket and the one that made me a happy wise grappler.
The “bad” bucket consisted of all the things I took a chance on and didn’t work out in my favor. Although I would’ve wished for a happier ending for the items in this bucket, I gained a lot of wisdom and experience that I’ll carry over into 2011.
Finally, the “ugly” bucket consists of the missed opportunities that came my way because I either procrastinated or chose to do something that added little or no value to me (e.g. making a decision to play “Madden 10” instead of writing an e-newsletter article). I always knew those things probably took away more value than they added, in spite of the lame excuses I created to justify doing it.
However, with 2010 hours away from being a memory, I can say the benefits from the “good” and “bad” buckets made me a better person in the long run.
As for the “ugly” bucket, I’ll talk about how I’m going to deal with them in the next article.
So, have fun celebrating the New Year and best wishes for 2011! 🙂
After a good workout in “The Lab” last week, a few OGs were looking
through their training notes and talking about all the things they
learned over the past year.
That’s a good thing.
But when I asked two simple questions, they had no clue about what
I’d just asked them.
And that was a bad thing.
I simply asked them if they…
1. Achieved the training goals they set out to accomplish for 2010?
2. If they hadn’t, what was their plan to achieve those goals
before the year was over?
And since they “just didn’t get it”, I had to explain the point I
was trying to make.
The first question focused on the fact that most people have a
basic understanding of setting goals. But since very few grapplers
talk about creating a plan to track goal progression, most goals
never make it beyond the sheet of paper they’re written on and go
unaccomplished. That’s the reason why they had goals at the end of
the year they didn’t get around to achieving,prepared to just
“roll them over” into 2011.
The second question focused on the idea of maximizing the last days
of the year to achieve outstanding goals instead of just “waiting
until next year” to achieve them. You can wait until next year to
do whatever you promised to do this year, but those last days you
let get away “this year” will be lost forever, regardless of that
foolish idea that you can just “work harder” to make it up later.
Once I explained it that way, they spent less time focusing on the
goals they achieved and more time on the work left to be done
before the year ended.
How about you? Have you reviewed your training goals and
discovered that you still have some work left to be done before
2010 is history?
Paul, I’m a 36 year old OG. I started BJJ back in 2003 and quit a
few times. Well now I want to try again but I keep backing out. I’ve
even driven out to the gym only to turn around and go home. I
suppose I’m worried about looking out of shape and getting hurt. I
think I’ve forgotten all my techniques too. What should I do?
TWG: This problem isn’t as tough as you think and happens quite
often, OG.
First, you should do is recognize the fact that deep down inside,
you REALLY want to train at BJJ, maybe even become a black belt
someday. The reason I point that out is to show you that you’re
NOT as big a quitter as you feel. If you were a “true quitter”,
you wouldn’t still be thinking about going back to the mat or going
as far as driving down to the school, in spite of the fact that you
never stop and go inside the school.
Second, 90 percent of this struggle comes from your poor mental
mindset about who you are or what you think you should be. It
doesn’t matter that you’re out-of-shape because most of the people
that start training are out-of-shape in the beginning, me included.
You just have to get back in there and let the training get you in
shape. And as far as forgetting the techniques that you learned
back in the day, no one will know that unless you want to go in and
start telling people that you’ve been training since 2003. If you
go into the school like you’re a brand new student that’s never
taken a BJJ class before, then there’s no pressure to remember
anything you learned back in the day and you can learn like every
other newbie taking BJJ for the first time.
Finally, as for worrying about getting hurt, you should know since
you’ve been training that bumps and bruises come along with the BJJ
Training. If you’re really concerned about it, use that concern to
help guide you to the right school to train. You don’t need to be
at a school with a bunch of up-and-coming MMAers where the risk of
being used as a grappling bag with feet is likely. Check around
and (if possible) find a school that’s being run by an OG
Instructor (see my website for a list of schools). If there aren’t
any schools run by an OG in your area, pay attention to the school
that seems to have a good number of OGs in their classes and talk
with a few of them. That should ease your concern about being hurt
because you’re an OG.
Bottom line: Do your homework to find the right school for you,
stop thinking about all the bad things that can happen (since most
of it is in your head), and get back on the mat so you can pursue
your dream of being a BJJ Black Belt.
And make sure to let me know once you’ve joined the school and how
the training is going once you’re back on the mat.
A few days ago, I was cleaning up my office and stumbled across
some pictures that I hadn’t seen in a while. They were pics of me
training back in the day as a white belt and the early days at
LIMAA.
And once I started looking at those pics, I couldn’t help but
notice all those guys that I trained with back then that kinda got
lost along the way on my grappling journey. Guys that I thought
were more likely to reach black belt than me.
Unfortunately, 90 percent of those guys never even made it to blue
belt.
The thing that made me shake my head in disappointment was the fact
that many of those guys were either REALLY good or had great
potential.
And as I looked through those pictures, I saw guys that were
bigger, stronger, meaner, more technically proficient, and way more
mentally tougher than I ever could be.
But for some unknown reason, they just got off the road to black
belt.
And as I put those pictures back in the box, I thought about how we
never really talked about becoming black belts back in the day.
Most of us thought it was such a far away goal to reach that we
just trained hard and ignored it.
But now I’m starting to wonder since we never talked about or
thought of ourselves as future black belts if that contributed to
many of those guys (and gals) falling off along the grappling
journey. Maybe just training for the sake of training, without an
end goal in mind, made it easier for many of them to lose interest
and quit.
What about your training? Are you training with and end goal in
mind (e.g. belt rank, coaching certification, etc.) or just
training because it’s fun and gets you out of the hose a few nights
a week?
Think about that question before you answer it. It may make the
difference as to whether you’ll still be on the mat five years from
now or talking about what you could have been had you stuck with it.
A few weeks ago, a grappler sent me an email where he talked about his frustration on the mat.
The grappler (who I’ll call Grappler X) has been training for about a year, experienced what I call “mat lows” and wanted to know if anyone else had these problems.
I assured him that he wasn’t the only BJJer experiencing these
issues and figured I’d write a list of “10 Common Mat Lows” that
every grappler experiences at some point during their grappling
journey.
I’m going to break these 10 Mat Lows down into parts so I can discuss each one in detail:
1. Progressing fast in beginning, then slowing down – when you first start training, EVERY grappler experiences that feeling of picking up things quickly because everything’s new. And when everything’s new, you’re going from someone who knows nothing to being proficient. Once you start becoming familiar with the techniques, the proficiency is still happening, it’s just not as noticeable like when you were new to the mat.
2. Unable to submit anyone during sparring – once grapplers start sparring, it’s usually difficult to submit or apply clean technique against an opponent because you’re spending too much time “thinking” about what to do instead of “reacting” to the situation at hand. The ability to “move without thinking” will only come with time, hard work and patience, NOT any sooner than that.
3. Watching classmates improve faster than you – this is something that grapplers deal with at every level, whether it’s based on friendly competition between teammates or just hating on someone that’s better than you. And since everyone learns and progresses at different paces, it’s only natural to look at the guy/gal next to you and wonder why it seems easy for them and hard for you.
In Part Two, I’ll talk about “Mat Lows” 4-7 dealing with overtraining, mat burnout, and injury.
Posted by Paul Greenhill 
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