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!’
