Mind telling me who you train under? I am really enjoying some of the advice you are giving and getting here lately.
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I don't train under anybody right now. I have never lived in a place where I was able to train with a qualified instructor full time so I pretty much taught myself with tapes, trained with other people and made training trips cross country to work with people. I got my blue belt under Pedro Carvalho many years ago and took some private lessons from Roy Harris, the Machados and Mike Jen. At this point I train no gi about 4-5 times a week with a single training partner.
We start standing and roll for about an hour straight. As we go we work on techniques and solve problems. We also do a lot of positional sparring to make sure we aren't developing positional weaknesses. There is nothing in the world like a training partner who you can freely work with and don't feel competitive with. Most bjj classes I attended were mini-tournaments in essence. If something happens in sparring we can stop and discuss what we did and look for solutions. If I feel my parnter trying a new move I cut back on my resistance and let him complete it so he can get a better feel for it. If I was allowed to train with a black belt like this for a year I believe I could catch up to him (actually if any instructor rolled with a single student nearly every day and taught them as they went the student would catch up very quickly).
I guess working with a variety of instructors and seeing how things are done by numerous instructors on tapes and dvds has given me a pretty broad perspective on the many ways to skin the cat of grappling. Since I have been "studying" grappling for so many years I think it has sunk in at least on an intellectual level even if I don't personally apply it all when I wrestle.
I believe you have to train with higher ranks to get to that rank so without a regular supply of purples, browns and blacks to roll with I am kind of stunted in my growth. I don't even know where I stand skill wise. I am probably like a purple belt without the gi and a mid level blue belt with it and as far as I know I might stay at that level for a long time. I do think my takedowns are much stronger than they have ever been though. I like to work from the clinch. I am not much of a shooter but I love doing greco and judo types of throws no-gi.
At this point I don't know if I will hook up with an instructor again or just wrestle as a hobby and to try to stay in shape. I know who I would train with if I could so finding an instructor is no longer an issue. I don't care much about belts anymore and it gets expensive to fly around the country for training. At this point my problem isn't really needing more techniques to train or more technical solutions to problems but rather higher level guys to spur me on. I think for most people they have plenty of guys tapping them but not enough technical answers so I think I did everything backwards because of my situation.
Anyway I love grappling and hope to continue doing it on some level well into my older years. I want to be tapping out 18 year olds when I am 45.
Cool man thanks. I know what you are saying. I had a training partner like you describe for 5 years who has moved to europe.
If I was allowed to train with a black belt like this for a year I believe I could catch up to him
Great insight. I remember my instructor spent a whole year on leglocks from Roy Harris. It was freaky how good he became.
Thanks for taking the time write all of that.