Leaving Behind Childish Things

I rolled with a blue belt visitor the other night. It was an interesting learning experience. We were about the same height but he had 20-30 pounds on me. I shot at the start and he sprawled but I sucked the leg in and picked him up. We were too close to the wall to finish the takedown so I tapped him to let him know and we started over more in the middle of the mats.

I didn't want to fight for a second takedown so I pulled guard and locked him up. Now this is where things got "interesting." First he tried to open my guard by pressuring back and digging his elbow into my thigh. I'm thinking "okay, he's playing it safe but he surely doesn't expect this to work on another blue belt does he?" Yeah, it was unpleasant but there was no way that it was going to open my guard. So I broke his posture down and threatened a couple of chokes.

I wasn't deep enough into his collar to finish, but he was working A LOT HARDER than I was so I wasn't in any hurry to transition to something else. He got his posture back and I went to work for a triangle. Again he was burning a ton of energy trying to defend and stack me, so since I wasn't too uncomfortable despite the weight disadvantage I let him. With a mighty effort he stopped his stack and stood up, so I released the triangle and pulled him back into guard.

The next time I break his posture, he puts his forearm across my neck and starts to pressure into the classic "bully pass" and once again I'm thinking "surely he doesn't think this is going to work does he?" At this point, I'm curious about what his "game" is so I move him around for a minute or two and he simply moves from digging his elbows into my thighs when his posture is back a bit to the forearm across my neck bully pass. By now I'm thinking, "really? Does anyone really expect these types of pain passes to work on any belt other than white? Are these the only two passes this guy knows?" Apparently they were the only passes he knew so it was time to flower sweep. I consolidated mount and he tapped from exhaustion (did I mention he was working A LOT HARDER than I was).

My point (other than wanting you all to think I'm awesome :-))? Sometimes we need to let go of things that might have served us well at one point in our Jiu Jitsu journey. Bully passes and relying on strength might work at whitebelt but we have to expand our game when we get to blue, and continue making adjustments on our path to black belt.

I'm not saying that we should abandon "old" techniques for "new" techniques, but rather that we need to keep the techniques in our arsenal that work at the black belt level as well as white. We should constantly be evaluating our game and making sure that we continuously refine it. We should examine our rolls against higher ranking students on the mats and constantly look at what is working in black belt matches at the world level. Even though we like our toys, sometimes we need to leave behind childish things...