E176 | Ridiculous Jiu-Jitsu Traditions That Need to Die

Full Transcript

David Figueroa Martinez: Welcome to Tapped In. My name is David Figueroa Martinez, and today we're going to be discussing ridiculous Jiu-Jitsu traditions that should just die forever. I recently came across a uh, video that someone posted—a loved one—of their family member being promoted to X belt, don't remember what it was. And they—how they went through this gauntlet, and they had—uh, I don't know if it was 45 minutes or 60 minutes of just pure rolling, and then they added something at the end where they had to defend or use the Jiu-Jitsu against someone with gloves on, striking, and they had to subdue, submit, and so on. And then, at the very end of the video, they did the belt whipping.

I—I hate some of the traditions in Jiu-Jitsu. They're so goofy, and dumb, silly. They don't build camaraderie, they don't build um, effective units, they don't build—it's the reason why the military got rid of that type of shit. It doesn't help. It doesn't make you feel any more tight as a unit. And it lends itself to culty behavior, culty shit, and it—it is not good PR, if I'm going to be honest. And there's a couple of things that I'm going to go through, and I'm going to touch on belt whipping in a minute, more detailed, but there's just things that we need to do better. And sometimes when we see these things out, and I see them being recorded and posted, and I'm just like, these things need to die so that this sport can have some—some actual growth beyond what we think is big right now.

Like, the sport has grown quite a bit in last 10 years, 5 years. But there's a lot more we can do, and a lot more that it can become, but it's not going to be that way with this shit. So uh, sometimes I hear coaches saying, uh, "You have to earn your water." I do not give a shit about your water. Go get your water. Between rounds go get water. Between uh, sets go get water. It's so idiotic to think, "I'm going to regulate your water because I want to somehow make you tougher." I personally—and this is just me—I do not drink water between rounds. I started this as a white belt, and maybe it was a foolish thing that I was doing to kind of mentally make myself sound or look tougher than I was, I don't know.

But I didn't get water. So the round would end, I'd be exhausted, I'd be panting, I'd be trying to catch my breath, I would fix my gi, fix my belt, sit Indian style or however, and I would wait for the next round to start. It wasn't something that I was—I—I didn't necessarily need the water. But as a coach, I don't believe that I need to deprive students of water in order to somehow build something. It—it—it's not required. That was a personal choice on my end. And you'll rarely see me get water until the class is over, rarely. And that's just me, that's just something that I have built up, that's a certain specific training approach that I do. And there is literally—I don't have any science backing it, I don't have anything backing it that it's healthy, I have no idea.

It's just a mental practice that I have done. But I'm not forcing that on anybody else. If you feel you need water, go get water. It's idiotic to starve someone of water and be like, "Oh, all right, you're going to have to earn it through me." It also lends itself to, again, culty behavior. You're the lord of the water. Why? Oh, just go get water, we're all adults here. If we feel we need water because we've trained hard, or maybe we're drinking the night before and we're dehydrated, I am not here to make you suffer. I am here to make the training hard from time to time, maybe prepare you for something, but I am not here to make you suffer just idiotic. Belt whippings, and I don't necessarily have an issue with gauntlets.

But since I saw them in the same video, I'm putting them together. The gauntlet, I think that it's really beneficial to have something in place that forces a student to have to dig deep, deeper than they thought they could, and then have to overcome this thing in order to get that promotion. And I don't—in most cases, I don't think people necessarily fail because they get tired or—like I've never seen a gauntlet where someone was at minute 30 or minute 45 or however long it is, and they're exhausted and you can tell they're exhausted, and the coach fails them. I've never seen that. It's more of a, "This is going to be difficult, you're going to have to dig real deep." And I went to one at Alliance, and they do an hour for brown belts to get their black belts.

And they're invited, and then training partners are invited, and then every so many minutes, someone else jumps in, someone else walks swaps out, and they just keep rolling for the whole hour. It's exhausting. And it's maybe building a little mental fortitude, it forces you to have to have prepared, because if you didn't prepare, it's going to be a long 60 minutes. And I'm not necessarily against it. I kind of like the idea. Anytime that I was in the military and we had to graduate from something, there was this event that we had to overcome, and we did it as a team, and when you got done, it felt really good to have accomplished it. So I don't have an issue against gauntlets. I think they're fine, as long as they're not abusive. I don't have an issue against gauntlets that are self-defense oriented either, where like the person who's going to get promoted has to defend themselves against someone with boxing gloves and they're defending and showing Jiu-Jitsu, sweeping and getting to mount, defending from strikes, as long as they progress, and then armbarring or choking or whatever submission they end up hitting.

Personally don't have anything against that. I think that it could be abusive if you're seeing a guy who has to go to work tomorrow getting smashed in the face a bunch of times, but at the same time I understand that this is self-defense, and they're trying to get people prepared for something that might happen. I get it. But we also got to work. Like that—just—that's—we're not MMA fighters. We're hobbyists that are trying to enjoy a sport, enjoy work, not get CTE, and go back to our families. So I think there's a fine line there. I absolutely hate belt whippings. I think it's goofy, I think it's stupid, silly. I don't like seeing it, I have never participated in one. I was at a gym one time, and in the morning there was a guy who got promoted to blue belt, and he—he requested the—a belt whipping.

And maybe he didn't know any better, maybe he was completely fine with it, maybe he—"Oh, this is a tradition from back in the day." It wasn't something the gym necessarily did. He requested it. And him and his training partners, and the people at the class, I was—I wasn't visiting, but I was taking part in the morning classes whenever I could attend. And so I didn't know these people super close. And I remember the instructor saying, "If that's what you guys want to do, go ahead. Don't record it, don't take pictures, don't let it get out." And uh, when they were getting ready to, I walked off the mat, sat down, I did my belt, and just—I didn't participate. I felt like, again, it doesn't feel right. It's not—it's not beneficial to the team, it's not beneficial to that person's growth. It literally has no determining factor on if they know Jiu-Jitsu or not.

The gauntlet at least shows that you can put in the technique that you've learned when you're exhausted. That's showing that you know Jiu-Jitsu well enough that you're efficient enough that you can pull off the things that need to be pulled off as you're breathing hard and sucking in air and tired and exhausted, there's something that correlates with the promotion there. A belt whipping is just silly. It's like when they used to put the—the rank or whatever on military people's chest and then they would pound it in without the backings. So the stubs would just pierce the skin, and they would like rub it around and just—it was just silly. It's silly. There's no point in it. And I—I can somewhat understand if it's ceremonial and no one's trying to really hit you very hard and it's just like a—a little whack, okay, maybe.

Kind of like when people will throw a newly promoted student, it's like a half throw, it's not like super hard. I—okay, not my cup of tea, but I—I get it. Anything that I've seen online, it's always over the top, weird, and culty. Get rid of it. At the very least, don't film it. I don't think it's a good look for the gym, I don't think it's a good look for Jiu-Jitsu. And when it gets filmed and it gets released, your gym is now tied into that, and there's going to be a large group of people that are going to look at that because they've never seen it anywhere else, and they're going to think you guys are weird. You are turning off a good portion of students that might want to walk through that door, and you might already argue, "Well, we didn't want those students anyway." Again, that's also a silly approach. Just get rid of it. I hate the idea that you never question the coach.

Question me whenever possible. There's going to be times when I've told or I teach something, and you may have heard me say, "Well, you did the knee cut this way last week, why are we doing it this way now?" And maybe I didn't explain it completely. Maybe there's specific scenarios in which I'm teaching this situation in where the knee cut from last week was based on a very specific response, and the knee cut from today is based on another. But because maybe they're not necessarily interconnected, I didn't really go over all the specific details, and because maybe you're a little confused, asking questions isn't a bad thing. You might say, "Hey, you—you said this and this for this, and now you're saying this and this for that." There's going to be a lot of things in Jiu-Jitsu that are going to be specific to nuance, or specific grip, a specific angle, uh, a specific defense, and there's going to be times when it feels—there's going to be times when it feels like we're maybe countering each other when we are showing technique.

I get it. There's also going to be times where I might have a specific approach, and another instructor at the gym might have a different approach. We're not wrong, we're just approach—we're—we're fixing or finding a solution to a problem in different ways. So your question is needed, because then it sheds light on some of that, it sheds light on the idea that, again, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and my approach is right, their approach is also right. Their approach might be completely right, might be a better answer than mine. My approach might be a better answer because I'm 5'4". Their approach might be better because they're 6'1", uh, or this other person's approach might be better because they're 4'11" 115 pounds. So, there's nuance in everything that we do, so when you're confused, asking those questions during class are really important. They're, you know, place and time, of course.

Also, I think that being able and comfortable to ask questions of your instructor in private of, "Hey, how come we do promotions this way? How come—not that I'm demanding my promotion, but why did I fall short this—this year or this promotion period?" Those conversations should be—be had, and they should kind of be led by the instructor in my opinion. I do it for my students, I—will have conversations when promotions come around and I know someone's close to a belt, and last thing I want is for a student to show up to promotions excited that they're going to be promoted and then leave with that empty pit in her stomach because they didn't get promoted and they don't know why. So I'll have conversations with students where I explain what I'm looking for or, "Hey, I'm going to hold you back." Sometimes it's not a specific thing, and it's more of, "I just want you to get more time. I want you to nurture the exact things that you're already doing, I just need you to have more time in it, because you need a little more seasoning."

Perfectly fine. But again, sometimes instructors don't have these conversations, and the student has to lead. So when the student comes to you and they ask questions, be open, have honest conversations, direct feedback. These things need to happen. I came up in a—in a period where we didn't ask these questions. It was almost looked down on. "Don't disrespect me with these questions." It's silly. Like, why can't we have these conversations? I'm—I'm paying you a pretty penny each month to be led, to be instructed, to be coached, to be mentored, that I should be able to have these conversations, I should ask whatever questions I have. And for me personally as an instructor, I want my students to feel that way, so we have conversations, regularly. Uh, the other one that I sometimes see at some gyms is rolling hard with new people. We used to have, and I'm hoping this is dying, this idea that we have to make sure and weed out the weak, weed out the people who aren't Jiu-Jitsu material. Literally everyone that comes through that door is Jiu-Jitsu material until they prove otherwise.

And by that I mean, if you're a shithead. If you're a shithead, I don't need you learning Jiu-Jitsu. Point-blank. I need you to go do something else, go work on yourself. Now, if you're open—if you're a little bit of a shithead and you're open to learning and improving yourself both as a person and as a Jiu-Jitsu athlete and student, then by all means, perfect. But I don't think that we should try to weak out—weed out weak people and have this gym culture that's so tough that we—we put the new students through meat grinders and all they do for six months is just get beat up, silly. It's silly, you're—you're allowing money to walk out of the door. You're allowing potential to walk out of the door. You have no idea if any of these people stuck around longer because you nurtured more, what kind of level of black belt and instructors and gym assistants and coaches they could have been if you actually developed them. Take time to develop these people. Your job isn't to weed these people out, isn't to put them through a meat grinder so they quit, your job is to encourage and develop, and sometimes some people are going to need more developing than others. We're in a—a field with a lot of people dealing with trauma, who maybe have been bullied, who had to deal with SA, who had to deal with domestic violence issues, and your approach can weed all those people out who desperately needed this. Take time to develop. Um, let's see one more.

Sometimes we have this idea, and it's closely tied to that, where we need to have training so difficult that it legitimizes the kind of Jiu-Jitsu we have, and that kind of also ties into the gauntlet being what it is at some gyms. You do not have to make this that damn difficult. The time that people are putting in, the energy that they're putting in to develop over weeks, months, and years is what you should be measuring. You don't need to make this so hard that only the competitors kind of stick through and—and get better. You have to understand that the majority of the people that you're dealing with are kids and hobbyists. People who have full-time jobs, people who have full-time families, people who are—are dealing with a side job or a two jobs or— almost homeless, like there's a bunch of stuff these people are dealing with. Don't make this so hard that you want to somehow make your legacy and your—your belt system and your gym only for the—the hardest and the most dedicated in that sense. Train everyone that comes through the door.