Bushido Notebook

Endurance Conditioning: During sparring sessions, judo stand-up in particular, I used to find myself getting very tired, very fast. Part of it is breathing and relaxation, but another part of it is lack of conditioning. Some ways to condition the cardio are running and swimming, and better yet, combining the two. Running, depending on your own level of fitness, might be jogging for middle distance (2-4 miles) 2-3 times per week. You can supplement this with 40 yard prints at the end of the run. 1-10 sprints is sufficient, depending on your level of conditioning. The goal of the distance runs should be to improve your time every time you run. As for swimming, 1000 meter swims with minimal breaks is optimal for basic conditioning. Relaxation and controlled is a key to judo success as well as swimming. At the end of the 1000 meters and a 5 minute break, 50m sprints are a good way to max out after a swim, similar to sprints after a run. 2-10 is a good number, depending on your per...

In the last three years I've attended several Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ) seminars given by BJJ masters, mostly named Gracie. I wanted to see what ancient secrets these jiujitsu mystics had to teach that would give me the edge in my Bushido. The seminars, lasting from 3 hours to an entire 3-day weekend, go through an overwhelming amount of information and techniques. All of it great information...many techniques I wouldn't have figured out, or maybe even learned for years, if ever!.....Hardly of it anything I could remember once I got back on the mat the next week! How was I to be a true student of the art if I couldn't remember the techniques from the professors for more than a few hours? I should have paid attention to what I saw a few of the other students doing...a few blue belts and ALL of the purple belts.....they all had pens and varying levels of worn out notebooks. They were the true students....I might as well have been a guy paying good money to watch a demonstr...

I remember watching the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and watching Royce Gracie submit all challengers with his chokes and arm-bars.....it was like magic at the time. Years later when I first started Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ) I just wanted to put on the chokes that I'd learned in the Marine Corps and the arm-bars I was learning in class but I was finding that they were far easier to execute on a static partner than during sparring (rolling, randori). I found myself getting lucky here and there, but more and more often not even going for arm-bars because I'd end up getting reversed and submitted myself, or getting frustrated that I wasn't even getting a chance to try out my techniques because I was busy defending myself from them, especially from the more advanced students. It was like being a rag doll for months on end. That's no fun at all, and if it isn't fun, then why go to practice? The submissions are one of the more exciting things about practic...

Typically in Brazilian jiujitsu (BJJ) classes an instructor or senior student will teach 3 or 4 techniques and the students then practice them. They might be related or combinations, and they might not. One thing that happened to me as a beginner student is that I was overwhelmed with techniques and I still didn’t have a handle on the basics, much less the ability to add tools to my game. For a while I was frustrated because I couldn’t learn it all fast enough, and thought that maybe I was just a slow learner, until I realized two things: (1) the other new students with less than 6 months experience in BJJ were having the same issue, and (2) the blue belts with few or no stripes had really good basics, but rarely used the fancier, seemingly complicated techniques that were often taught in class. When I came to that realization I decided to come up with a methodology for my own training so that I was improving on my basics while still learning new techniques, but without overwhelming...