A couple of conversations and posts this last week had me thinking about improvement goals in BJJ or the fighting arts in general. The first conversation involved a simple mathematical concept of compounding improvement and the realistic expectations of how much better someone can truly become. Another conversation surrounded this meme recently posted on the Micro BJJ Facebook page.
What becomes tricky and can be frustrating for so many students of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is exactly how deep the rabbit hole can get. There are so many levels to mastery and so many aspects within the game to evaluate that it can be very hard to quantify improvement. Combine this obscurity with the fact that your teammates, sparring partners, and even instructors are working to improve alongside you. This can further hide your own improvement. How many of us have chased after that colleague who was a year ahead when we started, but we secretly vowed to tap out after putting in some time?
Two years later that same colleague is still making short work of us. Are we ever going to get better? Of course, we already have. So should have your colleague. In fact, you could probably wipe the mats with the original opponent you faced, but this is two years deeper into their journey as well (and they had a head start to begin with).
This is why the image above strikes such a chord in me. Most of us would drive ourselves into defeat if we constantly measured our success against others. There are also too many subjective variables to compare improvement student to student. One student’s 20 hours of practice may be more valuable than another’s 100 hours. One student’s physical gains may be matter-of-fact to another student. We must, instead, measure that success against ourselves. We must also do it over time.
Gustavo Dantas, The BJJ Mental Coach, discusses competitive improvement and the individual:
In highly complex skill sets, their is no substitute for deliberate practice over time. This is not a one year or two year commitment, this is a multi-year to multi-decade commitment. That is not to say a student cannot enjoy a year or two of training. It is just to say that we must all analyze realistic expectations of what can be done in the time we commit to. Forget the grandiose notion that after a year of hard work you are going to be the prodigy running circles around the purple belts. Jiu-Jitsu (in its beauty) does not work that way.
A friend posed the following question to me: through hard work and practice time, if we could improve our skill set just 5% month over month, do you realize that in only four years, this would be an improvement of 10x? Further extrapolating what those implications are for the 10 and 20 year student, is this even possible? The issue with this conundrum lies in the complexity of the skill. Compounding improvement (even at a goal of just 5% improvement each month) is a simple concept being applied to a very complex challenge. It cannot convey it accurately, only theoretically.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
On paper, 5% improvement over a month seems like a reasonable (if not meager) goal; however, this becomes exponentially harder to guarantee the higher we climb in the skill set ladder. Could Marcelo Garcia be 10x better than he is today in just another 4 years?! Unlikely. Complex skills are just too complex to measure this simply. How would we measure our net improvement across so many facets (bottom game, top game, guard game, guard passing, takedowns, takedown defense, new techniques, live application, belt promotions, competition, etc, etc)?
You could perhaps attempt to measure 5% improvement in a specific facet such as percentage of takedowns defended, but even within this realm it can be too nuanced. What if you were able to measure an empirical increase in your ability to stop the takedown—from 80% defended to 90%—only to realize that you now are defending into a neutral position, while during your 80% defensive reign you almost always stopped the takedown to end in a controlling position? Is that 10% improvement or actually a regression in your defensive game due to loss of positional control? Get my drift? Improvement is rarely a straight trajectory. Even the greatest athletes can develop ticks and bad habits that can set them back months or even years before getting back onto an upward climb.
Complex skill sets require cognitive and emotional fortitude as much as they do physical. We’ve all seen the white belt advice that warns of the ups and downs, the roadblocks, the constant defeat before small victories, and then states: Do not quit–it will get better! I think that too often the new student mistakes this as referring primarily to the physical challenges of staying fit, getting on the mats, getting beaten up, sweat, blood, exhaustion, etc. and doesn’t even begin to comprehend the mental and emotional roller coaster they are about to embark on.
Pressure Pushing Down on Me
Individual sports (vs. team sports) intensify these pressures. The team environment has the ability to disguise and dissipate individual weaknesses while showcasing and reinforcing strengths. In individual sports, any particular weakness is more likely to be exposed and magnified. This adds considerable mental and emotional pressure on top of the physical pressure of athletic performance. Combat sports ratchet that intensity even higher as the consequence of being bested or performing poorly actually becomes threatening, painful, scary, and physically dangerous.
So why do it? People who know me often ask how someone so easy-going can enjoy fighting so much. I always answer that the best fighters I know tend to be the least likely to get in a fight—they have much less to prove. The draw, for those of us seized by it, is that in learning to fight, you learn much more about yourself than your physical capabilities. I would dare to say you learn everything about yourself.
Fightland offered some similar thoughts in response to Nelson Mandela’s passing in December of 2013
I think of the advice I give my son as he climbs the junior belt ranks in martial arts. When he was young and new, promotions happened regularly provided he went to class and learned the new techniques. Now, five years in, promotions are much further apart, often held off, require more hours of practice, and regularly need to be retested for before receiving. I tell him to remember that not receiving a promotion is not the same as failure. You will get there if you continue to work at it. The only measure you need to understand is your own. Ask yourself truthfully, are you better than the last time? Are you closer to your goal? If the answer is yes, then you are doing the right things. You can tweak as needed from there.
Empirical and quantitative? No—it’s just too complex—but deep down, we know. We all know.
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