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The Pre-Fight Check In
A few days ago, in class, it was time to spar. I walked over to an older white belt, new to the club, who was standin...
Balancing Mat Time with Conditioning
Forget the work-life balance! Let’s talk about something much more important: the balance between mat time and condit...
Learning BJJ in a Digital Age
I recently did a remote interview with Marshall Carpenter from Lockflow.com on the topic of how the internet has chan...
Refusing to Concede the Sweep
I trained with Denis Kang for the first five or six years of his MMA career. At some point during that time he became...
Slumps Vs. Plateaus
Acquiring new skill sets and polishing your existing skills is the very essence of training. When everything is worki...
A Glossary of Guard Positions, or Lumping vs. Splitting
When it comes variations of the guard position grapplers tend to fall into one of two categories: ‘lumpers’ and ‘spli...
More Half Guard Resources
If you’re really serious about improving a particular position in your grappling arsenal then you’ll seek out any and...
Short & Long Term Problem Solving
Grappling is problem solving, and part of improving in Brazilian jiu-jitsu is maintaining enough awareness during spa...
A Pinch In Time
Grappling uses muscles that don’t normally get a lot of attention in the gym. As evidence of this I’ll point to the m...
Always Injured, the Feedback
Several tips ago I gave some advice to a reader who had suffered a rather terrible string of orthopedic injuries whil...
Always Injured
A reader writes:
Q: “I’m in my forties and and started MMA training a few years ago. Since then I have had many injur...
Jiu-jitsu and Physical Attributes
Physical attributes are things like balance, neck strength, limb length, explosiveness, leg flexibility, and percent ...