Martial Arts Masters...

I recently attended a BJJ seminar with Demian Maia. 

For those unfamiliar with Maia, he's a welterweight title contender in the UFC, an ADCC champion and a high-level BJJ competitor with various titles under his belt. Interesting Wikipedia-discovered fact: he also did a journalism degree. We could have ended up in the same industry!

The seminar was fun as two very good white belts I know got promoted to blue belt, then a very high-level blue belt got promoted to purple belt later in the week. All three got their belts for Maia, which is a great story to tell the grandkids! On a selfish note, it was particularly reassuring to see the blue belt get his purple belt because he ruined me without trying the last time we rolled and the gap between us was so massive I feared I was getting worse! But big differentials in skill levels within the same belt can happen at BJJ because the belts are so deep, with three years plus between promotions.

The teaching bit of the seminar was the most impressive bit, though, not only because of how it was taught but because of what was taught. So what do you imagine a top-of-the-food-chain BJJ competitor and UFC fighter was teaching? Some fancy reverse De La Riva sweep or a complex new attack from some funky new guard? 

No. Maia spent a couple of hours dismantling a basic armbar attack from side mount, which is something most white belts learn in the first few months, and he showed how he's worked on refining and tightening up the attack from this position. It may not sound that impressive, but the depth of knowledge and the detail he delivered was hugely impressive. 

In my other martial arts life as a hapkido student, the head of the school, an astonishing man from Korea who's been training in hapkido for about 60 years, is always saying 'Basics!' As a lower belt, I was sometimes annoyed about this because I always wanted to learn the next new thing. But now I've been around a bit longer, I fully appreciate the sentiment. Knowledge and learning can be horizontal to cover lots of ground, but real learning has to be vertical. It has to contain a depth of knowledge that is continually excavated and re-examined.

The Maia seminar had lots of genuinely nice moments, but that was probably my key takehome from it because it was a point when my hapkido training and my BJJ training connected. As I get older in martial arts years, I realise it’s better to have a smaller and more refined skill set than a larger and less developed one. You can know lots of stuff, but you rely on your go-to moves and combinations. Seeing Maia dismantle this technique and demonstrate that depth of knowledge helped make me feel better about not wanting to know more but to know less more thoroughly. 

I realised some time ago that my BJJ ‘game’, if such a thing ever materialises, will never be a complex thing. It will be based on simple and solid fundamentals that are drilled and continually refined over time. This is a development that started to happen in my hapkido, which I now see as a small skill set based on key principles that adapts to different circumstances and entry points, a few years ago. 

So it was nice to sort of have this approach also demonstrated by a high-level grappler like Maia. The lessons on leverage and keeping things together and closing down space were about attacking the armbar from side mount. But they were also applicable to everything else. 

To quote another martials arts man, one Miyamoto Musushi, ‘From one thing know ten thousand things!’