E193 | The Post-Comp Ritual: How to Recover, Reflect, and Rebuild

Transcript with Timestamps

00:00 Welcome to Tapped In. My name is David Figueroa-Martinez of DFM Coaching, and today we're going to be discussing post-comp dues. So, if you've been competing, if you maybe just started competing, I always had a little bit of a ritual that kind of helped me through the process, which I've kind of seen also happen with my students and students that maybe I know through cross-training or teaching at some of the other gyms. Competing takes a lot out of you. Specifically, if you, like most of us, we have a full-time job, we have a... Jiu-Jitsu is a side endeavor that we're partaking in where we're not necessarily quote-unquote "pros," we're not looking to do this all the time, but we want to compete, we want to get out there, we want to see what it looks like. We want to see what it feels like to represent your gym, to put your technique on the line against someone else, and to see where the... the gaps in your... your training are.

01:17 It is a beautiful thing to do. If you have the... the drive for it, I highly recommend at least doing it once, maybe once every belt, but at least once in your life just so you can see what the... the difference is. Because there's a vast difference between that and rolling around at a gym or even a cross-training event. There's a difference between what you do at your gym and doing an in-house. And then there's a difference between the in-house and doing a local competition, and again there's a difference between that and doing IBJJF Pans or Worlds, or an ADCC Open, or whatever it might be. But there's a couple of things that I've always liked to do after a competition, whether I was the coach or the athlete, and one of those things is getting into the cool down after everything's kind of done, my matches are over. I've noticed that some students will want to just kind of be by themselves for a little bit.

01:54 They might sit up against the railing, depending on what competition you're doing. If it's Jiu-Jitsu World League, for example, they just came by over the weekend. And they allow you... they're not as controlled about who's where, not like IBJJF. So sometimes some students just kind of sit next to the guardrail, and they just kind of hang out there for a minute. And you just got to let them think or catch their breath, or just kind of mellow out. Other students, they'll... they might be hyped because it was a gold medal performance, and they just want to be around people. So understanding which one you are is going to be a big help in coming down from the adrenaline dump and everything that you may have gone through.

02:37 You're going to have to assess for injuries. Because in the moment, you may not be aware. You really may not. I remember I got slammed one time during a competition, and while it was bad and I knew it was bad, I didn't feel how bad it was until like the adrenaline just kind of exuded out. And then I didn't realize how bad it was until following day, and I woke up that morning just wrecked. So assessing for injuries. There's some stuff that you may not be aware of; you were so hyped on adrenaline and hyped up on the emotion of winning and or losing, and your body just kind of turns those signals off sometimes. And so assess. What occurred, like... is everything okay?

03:13 You're going to have potential gi burns, like I... I just heard from one of the students at another gym that I kind of coach through the... the workshops. I saw a picture; he has a giant gi burn on his face. Like, you're going to have a some of that. You're going to have bruises that maybe you didn't normally have. You're going to have moments where the gi was pulled in such a way because people are a little more frantic, that you're just not aware. And once you settle down, you look and you start feeling things: "Oh, my ankle's a bit sore, I didn't know when that happened," or "I kind of tweaked my knee at some point, I'm not sure when that happened either." So assess for injuries. Let your emotion kind of calm down a little bit. If you don't want to be around people immediately, you don't have to. It is perfectly fine to just, "Hey, tell the coach and the people, hey, just give me a minute." And just decompress. Let it out, let it... let yourself just kind of calm.

03:47 And then, once everything is settled and you get your medal or you don't get a medal, and everyone else is done, if there's other people still competing, support them. Don't leave. My recommendation is to stick around and kind of cheer everyone else on like they cheered for you. It's part of team building, and it goes a long way. But once everything is settled and everyone is done, I have always been a proponent of going out to eat together. And I remember, I can remember specific meals that I... we went out to where, whether I did good or bad, the act of getting something to eat together was always like a... it became a ritual for us, and it became something where we get to just kind of settle and laugh and joke about shit. Whether it was stuff that happened in the match or they're giving you feedback in the moment, or you're just with the group having a good time.

04:18 We did a competition a couple of years back where quite a few of us in the morning competed. I did not; I coached. And the best part of the whole day, regardless of what the results were of the matches themselves, was getting to eat together at the end of it, and laughing and joking and having a great time regardless of what the results were. And it helps team camaraderie, it helps your psychological recovery, it helps you almost put things into perspective like, "Hey, at the end of the day, none of this really matters. We go back to our lives, we start going back to training, we go do the things that we would normally do, win or lose." And it's one of the things that kind of helps, in my opinion, when you've lost, is like how quickly things just get back to normal.

04:53 The act of losing and then just going home, I think allows you to stew a little bit. But if you can go out with the team and just have a good time, getting Mexican food or whatever it is that was chosen, it gives that buffer between the... the loss and you, you don't get to sit and ponder about it too much because you're already moving on to the next thing, which is hanging out with people that you've been training with for months and or years, and it helps the growth and it helps the advancement in understanding that, again, at the end of the day, none of this really matters all that much. It's all for learning process, and you don't have to sit there and stew and dwell and get emotional about it. We're just going to move as a team.

05:43 At some point, I would suggest having a conversation with the coach. Some students want to have that conversation right away thinking that it helps you because everything's fresh. The downside, and there's something to that, but the downside is your perspective on the match is skewed by the emotion, the adrenaline, and everything else that's going on, especially if you maybe haven't competed all that often. The crowd, the noise, the... the everyone just talking, everyone, you hear buzzers everywhere, and you hear coaches screaming at other people and screaming instructions, and you hear... you hear so much that having that conversation at the moment probably isn't the greatest thing because you're going to miss a lot of details. There's going to be moments where you think you had a certain position, this and that, and you misremember the details of the match because you were so hyped on things.

06:26 So sometimes it's good to have that conversation, especially if you're a little bit more in tune with what actually happened, or if the mistake maybe was so egregious that you made, that you're both on the same page about what happened. Then maybe you can have that conversation. But personally, I think the conversation can happen later. Um, right off the bat, it's from a coach, it's "Great job, I'm proud of you, I'm proud of what you did out there, regardless of which way it went." I personally do not care. As a coach, I'm not coaching professional athletes, we're not getting out there to make a name for ourselves as competitors. So the line of thinking and communication is a little different.

06:50 Getting out there is a big one. And you may have some minor successes that we're really proud of, and then you may have made some minor mistakes that we can fix real quickly, and then sometimes it's egregious stuff that we don't really need to talk about right now. But at some point, we should discuss. And that discussion should happen when the emotions are kind of out of the way. I don't want to talk to an athlete who is emotional, even if the end result was a success. Um, let's say they got silver. They're incredibly happy. At some point, there must have been a mistake that was happening; I don't want to rain on that, the day of. I want to be as proud and happy about that success because silver's a great medal to get. In some cases, bronze is a great medal to get. It's all perspective in where we were at any moment in our lives, and for some of us who maybe have never competed in anything whatsoever, getting out there and competing for the first time and getting a medal is a massive success. You don't want to rain on that. So the conversation about what we could have done differently, that can happen later. That can happen in a text, that can happen in a... in a face-to-face or a phone call, following day or sometime that week. It does not have to happen right away. And we don't have to get into a rush to get to that point.

07:35 I highly recommend getting video. And I do a service where I review people's sparring or competition footage, and it's done through CoachNow, and I can put graphics, you can hear my voice, if I wanted to, you can see my face, and we can stop, we can rewind, we can slow motion the whole thing, and I can review your whole match. Typically, I will review like top two to three issues because if I reviewed the entire match, it can get a little lengthy. But I try to keep it on the shorter end, and I try to pick two, maybe three key things that I felt like, "Hey, this you did really well, I love the way you handled this position here," and then, "These two spots, we could have did this a little differently."

08:14 And they get the video, and they have all the remarks in the video, there's no need to like visually look at notes or for both of us to kind of sit down. We can always review after the fact; they watch the video, "Hey, I still have questions about you mentioned doing a pendulum sweep here, I'm not really familiar with that, can you review, or I got the underhook here but then he put his weight down and I wasn't really sure how to respond to that. What should I have done?" And then you can have those conversations back and forth. But the video review is super important, especially these days. At Jiu-Jitsu World League, for example, they record all of their matches from my understanding, and you can go through and watch on your own, you can collect the video from a teammate, you can screen grab the video from Jiu-Jitsu World League or wherever you're watching it from. But um... I don't think it can be something that's ignored, especially if you're a competitor and you pay good money to compete. The result when it comes to wins and losses is secondary; the real win and the biggest achievement in that is that you can actually review mistakes you made and the things you did really well. That should not be ignored. Not today. We have too much technology to not dive into that portion of trying to get better.

08:44 Um, some people will argue against this: I think you should take some time off. Jiu-Jitsu does not have an off-season; it is constantly going, regardless of whether you're a competitor, someone who competes a lot as a hobbyist, quote-unquote "hobbyist," or you're someone who maybe does it once a year, once in a lifetime, once whatever. Taking three to five days off is a good thing. I understand that we all want to get back to training, and we all want to get back to it, and it's the thing that we love. Without an off-season, we're going at it pretty regularly, pretty vigorously. If you decide to compete, you're probably putting more time into it. You're probably training harder, training with more intent, training with more of a mental focus. Your body's probably banged up by the time you get to competition.

09:25 You are wound up, in a lot of instances; you're taking on a lot of the emotional load because you're worried, you're nervous, you're worried about your weight. So there's a lot that goes on there. My recommendation, and a lot of people will not suggest this: take three to five days off and go do some other shit. In the process, at least for me, when I compete, I'm putting a lot of time into that craft and preparation. I don't want to get to the competition stage and say, "I should have trained more." I trained as much as I could with the life decisions that I had to make: the full-time job I had, the spouse that I had, the other responsibilities that I had. But I upped my training, I trained hard, I neglected some things because you have to neglect some thing if you're going to go train five, six days a week when you normally do three. You have cut something out.

10:05 And sometimes that something is time with the spouse, sometimes that is time with the kids, whatever. So, when you compete, take that week off, take three days off. And just reacclimate to the environment that you may have neglected to some degree. Spend more time with the kids, spend more time with the wife, spend more time with the husband, check in on your parents if that's something that you also kind of putting off. And just get back to that. They sacrifice, especially your wives, husbands, and children; they sacrifice some time with you knowing that you had this big competition that you were preparing for. The fairest thing you can do is, "Hey, I'm going to take some time off from my passion, and I'm going to spend it on you guys." There's nothing wrong with that. Additionally, you might be banged up; taking a week off isn't a bad thing. Let your body recover, let your body kind of get back to normal, maybe you go hiking, you go swimming, you go do some other shit that you normally don't do. But it's a good thing to separate, in my opinion, and some people will say, "No, you got to get right back at it," I don't necessarily agree. I like the time off.

10:43 And then lastly, after you've done the time off, after you've had that conversation with coach, after you reviewed that footage, it's now time to put a game plan together to kind of fix some of the technical holes that you may have had during the competition. Sometimes that might be cardio, and we can argue whether you want to build up cardio when you're not in competition mode. But sometimes it's, "Hey, I didn't realize that my underhook just wasn't that great. I didn't realize that my guard... that I have a lazy habit of letting people control my legs, or I noticed that when I'm in bottom of side, I relax too much, or I'm using too much muscle instead of the structure of my arms."

11:13 So when you reviewed the video, you have the results from the competition, and now you get to really implement some changes into your game, that's why we do the competitions as hobbyists. We're not looking for stardom or anything; those are ways of opening up our eyes to the things that maybe we haven't been keen on paying attention to, maybe we ignored, maybe we didn't realize they were as important. One of the things that I think students who don't or have never competed, their decision making isn't fast enough sometimes. Or they're too passive in allowing people to pass the guard, or they allow people to do certain things, break their posture down.

11:42 And then you go to competition, and you realize how important all that shit is and that you can't give an inch or it turns into a mile. And then you start realizing, "Oh, okay, I understand why the stuff is super important." Because at the gym, we're playing around. We're, "Oh, I get into a bad position, alright, I get out of it and I do this and I do this." When you're on the competition scene, that bad position leads to four, five minutes under mount and you can't get out. You lose the match, and all you did was sit under mount the entire time. So it opens up your eyes to a lot of things, and afterwards, that's the time to fix some of it. Fix the most pressing top one or two things. Don't try to overhaul your entire game; keep it within the structure of what you're doing, but usually there's certain mistakes that we make that don't require us to throw out whole games, but just improve some key areas. And that's all it means.