99 Problems

Now that you’ve figured out exactly how good you are and how much you’ve been improving, your problems have probably all disappeared.

Congratulations.

That must be nice for you.

For everyone else, getting better at jiu jitsu usually does not mean the problems go away. It usually means the problems become more specific.

When you first start training, everything can feel like one big problem.

You got swept. You got passed. You got stuck. You got submitted.

Not knowing much about jiu jitsu means you probably don’t get more details than this.

But as you get better, you start to see more.

You do not just know that a move failed. You might start to understand why it failed.

Maybe your base was off. Maybe your timing was late. Maybe your grips were wrong. Maybe you rushed the transition. Maybe you skipped the control. Maybe you were too impatient. Maybe you made the right decision, but at the wrong time.

One of the worst parts of getting better at jiu jitsu is that you start to know enough to understand why you suck so much.

This is one of the cruelest rewards of getting better.

You get to notice more things going wrong.

At first, your biggest problem might be, “I do not know what to do.”

Later, it becomes:

“I know the escape, but I waited too long.” “I know the sweep, but I lost the angle.” “I know the pass, but I rushed the finish.” “I know the submission, but I skipped the control.” “I know I should relax, but I was too busy trying not to lose.”

That might not sound like progress, but it is.

Being able to see the problem more clearly is part of getting better.

You used to only know that something went wrong.

Now you are starting to know where it went wrong.

And yes, technique is still one of the problems.

So is timing, patience, and decision-making.

So is your ability to stay calm when things are not going the way you would prefer, which, in jiu jitsu, is most of the time.

And if we keep digging, one of the problems that keeps showing up over and over again is strength.

Sometimes we use too much of it. Sometimes we do not use enough of it. Sometimes we blame our partner’s strength when our timing was the real problem.

Sometimes we blame technique because we have heard that jiu jitsu allows a smaller person to beat a bigger person, and somehow we turn that into the idea that jiu jitsu rewards us for being gentle, polite, and physically unimpressive.

It does not.

So if you are getting better and still finding problems, good.

That means you are paying attention.

And if strength keeps showing up as one of those problems, that is probably worth noticing.

Not because strength is bad.

Not because technique does not matter.

But because strength is usually involved whether we want to admit it or not.

See you on the mats.