27 April 2015

Mentality of sparring in BJJ

BY Reza Tahar

Mentality of sparring in BJJ

They say your true character really shows when you’re under pressure. I think when they said that they didn’t mean it literally. If you’ve been around long enough on the mats you’ve probably seen your fair share of different types of grapplers. You have your really aggressive bull testosterone types, your perpetually slow roll not even trying hard types, the types who always seem to be “giving” stuff to you and many others. Granted there is a time and place for every one of those characters, however when you do not know when to transition, when to go hard and when to go slow, then it becomes a problem. Here are some tips that you can take with you to make sparring more beneficial and enjoying for you and your rolling partners.

1. It’s not all about winning: You do not always have to go hard, sometimes you need to take it down a notch and use more technique rather than power and brute force. Use grappling time as a chance to really solidify your techniques and iron out the little kinks in your game. Leave all the explosiveness and power for competition time. If you can land your moves without using strength, imagine what you could do when you combine both technique and power.
2. Take risks don’t just defend: It is a lot easier to defend submission attempts rather than to make the submission attempts. It’s easy to understand because when you attempt a submission attempts you are giving your opponent the opportunity to sweep or escape thus you lose the advantage you just had. Some people also fall into a bad habit of just defending the whole time becoming a turtle. This does not help you or your training partner at all. Take some risks go for the attacks or the sweeps. If you fail that’s good! Now you can go and understand why you failed and work on that and you would have become better even though you failed.

Example Of Just Defending: https://www.jiujitsupedia.com/category.cfm?form=1&id=44

 3. It’s like a dance: Follow the pace of your training partner. There should be a mutual understanding beforehand of how intense the roll is going to be either spoken or unspoken. If you were going really slowly with someone for the last 4 minutes and all of a sudden he goes 120% on you it wouldn’t feel very nice would it? It’s like as if he’s taking advantage of the situation. If you want to speed up the tempo do it gradually so that your partner has time to get the message and vice versa.

4. We are here to learn: Go in with the mentality of learning and it wouldn’t matter if you won or lost or tied. You can learn from anyone, it does not matter of their skill level or size. Every mistake your make is an opportunity for learning, if something did not work go and understand why it did not work and improve. Put your ego aside, practice humility, go and lose a few rounds. It’s really ok, no one will judge you.

Example of tapping out: https://pointblankgym.wordpress.com/brazilian-jiu-jitsu/

 5. Don’t stop until you’re done: No matter what if the time isn’t up, don’t tap out to your partner because you gassed out. It’s your responsibility that you at least last until time is over to give him and yourself the mat time you deserve. Not only that but pushing yourself when you’re all gassed out builds character and makes almost everything you do become pure technique since you can’t rely on your strength and atheletiscm anymore. During competition there are times where you will feel exactly like this, just wanting to give up, it’s during these times on the mat during training that you learn how to push through the pain.