You don't have to start BJJ / Grappling at a young age to be successful

(The above pic of a young Rickson is from Kron Gracie's Website)

There, I said it!

On Fridays I spend an hour or so teaching my younger brother Sam the basics of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and it's a great time. It's part me using him as a guinea pig for teaching, but more importantly I get to spend regular time with him. I think we both get just as much out of the walk to and from the gym as from the time on the mat. He's starting to become a familiar face and a lot of my friends at the Labs have commented on how lucky he is to start learning at such a young age- Sam's 14.

Neither Sam nor I have any long-term plans for his BJJ training and if was to quit and join a basketball club, we'd probably be shooting some hoops on Friday afternoons. The comments have however got me thinking about the perceived correlation between starting age and BJJ / Grappling ability and here are my thoughts.

Starting early does not guarantee anything. It does not guarantee that you would be a better player and it definitely doesn't guarantee that you will be a better coach or instructor!

It CAN help, that's all! It CAN. There is a possibility that by starting the learning process early you could initiate a chain reaction that may lead to achieving greatness in BJJ, or anything else really. First, there are numerous factors that need to be present and planets to be aligned before this can lead to anything tangible.

In his fantastic book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell describes the process of success and if we were to boil it down to one thing it would be 10,000 hours of practice. He shows you, through a multi-disciplinary approach that that figure is more or less the golden formula that you need to shoot for. Now, do you have 10,000 hours to spare? I don't. My wife doesn't and most people I know don't.

My brother does. Children have time. They maybe short on cash, strength and regrets but time they have in abundance. If that time is combined with an interest in sports, presence of a coach qualified to teach BJJ grappling to children and understanding (supportive and financially stable) parents for the duration of those 10,000 hours then we have something. That's why I love being a part time grappler. My mission is to find the most efficient ways to make everything I do benefit my BJJ / Grappling journey and vice versa.

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The Gladwell Talk

As some of you may know, I attended the Malcolm Gladwell Live talk last night at the Lowry. It was a great event and I left it a richer intellectual being. But we'll get to that in just a bit. My beautiful evening went off to a great start.

Little did I know that I'd run into fellow BJJ Grappling enthusiast Adam Adshead and his girlfriend. He commented on my Facebook that he'd be there and we agreed to meet during the interval (since there was no interval, we moved that to after the talk). Adam spends his days working the dream job at NME and his evenings chasing the perfect kimura in his capacity as the BJJ Grappling coach at Factory BJJ. I have been in contact with Adam for over a year now and this was actually the first time we met and shook hands. I was hoping we'd spend a few moments chewing Jiu Jitsu and of course the evening's topics before parting, but as I said above, he didn't come alone and his girlfriend was tired. Oh well.

The theatre was about 90% full and in a quick, unscientific scan of the audience my eyes spotted 3 or maybe 4 persons under the age of 30. Malcolm entered the spotlight at 8 sharp and proceeded, with wit and engaging charm, to take us on a journey. An exploration of the talk's topic: Serendipity. An exploration that took us from the courageous Galileo and the enthusiastic, if not incompetent, C. Columbus thru the world of pharmaceutics, past the state of education today and, like any good story teller, back to Galileo. It was a very exciting 80 minutes. Exciting because we didn't really know where he was going to take us (something that proved very relevant to the theme) but also because when he opened doors and unveiled statistics, he also proved the value of the whole journey. The value that lies in braving the unknown. It's safe to say that I got more food for thought than I can shake a stick at and that's in BJJ Grappling, coaching methodology and life as a whole. Simon Biltcliffe can go get knotted!

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Malcolm Gladwell Comes to the UK

It's hard to describe how excited I'm about this, but i just booked my ticket to see Malcolm Gladwell live at the Lowry in Salford.

Mr Gladwell's books (Outliers: The Story of Success and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) have been great influences on the way I view my work, studies, BJJ and other hobbies. His writing is very refreshing and mind-opening and his research is always very thorough.

I was initially googling his name because I wanted to quote him in an email to Caleb at the Fightworks Podcast about their latest episode (more specifically the 10,000 hour rule) and was so excited to see that he was coming to the north west of England in about 10 days!

This should be great and of course expect a review.


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