Maybe, It’s Time!
Recently, a 14 year old male signed up for BJJ classes and had his first lesson last Saturday. He did very well for the first time. Toward the end of the class I let him have a roll (wrestle) with the other students and he did surprisingly well and was asked by his opponents if he had done any training before. He answered ‘only from what he and his mates have been doing at school from watching UFC matches and YouTube’. Of course, this young man has just signed up and now he will get proper instruction.
About two weeks earlier, a 16 year old signed up with us, and he seemed half decent for his first lesson. This is the scary part! Two weeks into his training one of my female students (a 16 years old) who is not a BJJ student took on this guy for a roll. She gave him a bit of grief and embarrassment. I asked her ‘where did this come from’? She said, "Just watching you in class, Sir". What on earth are they feeding kids today?
During my younger years of practicing Karate I did 2 years of Thai Boxing because I wanted to be a better martial artist than the person next to me. Multi-skilling leads to an improvement overall in your martial arts training; that does not mean specializing in one area is a bad thing but I believe every specialist should have some knowledge of other martial arts as well. You have to know a bit of grappling to know what to look out for if you ever come across a grappler and the same goes for a kickboxer. In fact, just about every kid in school knows a little something about grappling and kickboxing. It's all about learning more and more. If we stop learning that is when you actually believe you are a 'master'.
Did you know the following BJJ Instructors have Black Belts in other styles:
- Steve Perceval (Hapkido)
- Rob Naumoski (Ninjitsu)
- John Will (Silat)
- Richard Norton (Goju Ryu Karate)
In fact, many of the Kickboxers have Black Belts in Karate, Tae Kwon Do or Kung Fu. Maybe, it's time (the alarm is ringing). Don't keeping hitting the snooze button because sooner or later you are going to have to get up!
GA
Amateur Tournaments can be very controversial when compared to Full Contact events such as Kickboxing, Full Contact Karate and Ground Fighting. The reason for this might be because anything less than full contact can be difficult to gauge making it controversial whether a penalty should be given or not. I am not advocating everybody should do full contact but people should be aware of the shortcomings and perhaps give tournament promoters and their judges of these tournaments a fair go. If you don’t like it then perhaps it’s time to move into the bigger arena.