What’s the most useful thing you learned in BJJ that your coach never formally taught you?
Not a technique. More things like timing, hand fighting, patience, pace, breathing under pressure, or hiding intention. A lot of the stuff that makes someone genuinely good seems to get learned through rounds rather than taught directly.
What was the biggest one for you?
And more importantly, do you think it actually could be taught deliberately, or is it one of those things people just have to develop through experience?
4 Comments
I learnt how to control a person with pressure and not getting submitted after lot of losing i learnt how to be patient and control
I think mine would have to be concepts. I believe this is due more to teaching methods evolving rather than my coach not teaching it.
To be 100% honest, I really have not learned a lot from any of my coaches in terms of technical stuff or even conceptual things. Much of it was either self discovered, or by studying outside people.
One of the biggest impacts to my training and coaching was my biomechanics class in college. It really made me think heavily in terms of leverage based Jiu Jitsu which had a hugely positive impact.
The names of all the different positions while helpful at times I think can over complicate the sport for new and moderately new people. I think it subconsciously creates these walls of separation between positions. For example I was very interested in spiderguard for years and was constantly looking for spider guard instructionals to help my game. If an instructional didn’t have the word spider in it I wasn’t interested and didn’t think it was applicable. More recently, I see that most moves can be applied similarly with a slight modification to your guard of choice. If I was to watch a dela riva instructional now and saw a move that I liked and wanted to use in my game, I would simply apply the technique with a spider hook and try to apply the concept.