BJJ Community: Why I Train

I had a great session last night. Martyn covered a couple of mount retention techniques but the specifics of what we did is not what excited me, but rather something that happened afterwards.

During the Integration phase, we started every roll from mount. My first roll was with Martyn and the way he escaped mount, swept me and got on top to finish with a reverse triangle just made me chuckle.

Let me explain. To me, the beauty of BJJ is that it's very objective. It's very honest. As Matt Thornton puts it "you cannot fake being good at BJJ anymore than you can fake being good at speaking Spanish, playing the guitar, or playing basketball" And the way I see it, you can be good at BJJ and it wouldn't be a matter of subjective opinion like diving or gymnastics or even tennis. There are defensive and offensive principles within the art and they all, in my opinion, evolve around awareness. You can argue with my opinion but you can't argue with the principles. There are right ways to armbar someone and there are wrong ways and if you’re always getting caught in armbars, there is definitely a fundamental principle that you are overseeing.

The exciting thing that hit me towards the end of last night's session was how many good people there was on our mat. People with different games and pressures and body builds but all very, very good and it felt great being part of that. I honestly couldn’t care less about competitions or MMA. I just want to stay part of what I experienced yesterday: a large group of different individuals playing different games and learning more about themselves thru BJJ/Grappling in a healthy learning environment. There is nowhere else I'd rather be.

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