I don’t think we can deny that jiu-jitsu is evolving really fast.
Whether it’s the false reap, the buggy choke, the Aoki lock, the berimbolo, the roadhouse choke, or the upside-down-inside-out-caterpillar guard, new techniques and strategies are popping up all the time.
Even if you don’t want (or can’t) learn the berimbolo (or whatever) shouldn’t you at least know how to counter it?
So why are some instructors and many senior students stuck in a magical past when men were supposedly men and jiu-jitsu was supposedly much better?
Did you know that, statistically speaking, MORE matches end in submission now than they did 20 or 30 years ago? I would consider that progress.
Maybe it’s because keeping up with changing trends is daunting. Unfortunately, this leads to many “peaked in high school” practitioners.
I’m definitely not immune to this tendency to live in the mythical past, so I do my best to resist it. I try to stay up with the trends to the best of my ability and flexibility.
For example, back in 2003 I took a deep breath and released the very first Grapplearts instructional. It was called Omoplata and the Dynamic Guard.
At the time, the state of jiu-jitsu instructionals was abysmal. Typically most BJJ VHS tapes were a just a collection of random techniques presented without rhyme or reason.
(Kids, ask your parents what VHS tapes were.)
I’m biased, but I think my first omoplata was a pretty damn good instructional. It was actually organised into logical sections: setups, entries, followups and counters. It contained drills and live competition footage.
At the time, some people called it the best instructional they had ever seen.
But the art moved on and I kept on learning new things. So last year – two decades after Omoplata and the Dynamic Guard – I took a deep breath and refilmed a vastly updated instructional on the omoplata submission called Omoplata 2.0 and the original instructional was relegated to bonus status.
It’s hard, but jiu-jitsu changes and jiu-jitsu instructors should change too.