Entering the System
Entering the System
The Mental Arts Tidbit
Current Musing
I apologize for not writing enough lately (or perhaps you’ve liked the fewer emails!) I’ve been busy at work creating presentations, corraling attorneys, and generally having a great time doing what I do best: being myself. 🙈 I met up with some of my training partners from my first jiu jitsu school, and we had a great time catching up. Finally, I received my first COVID shot today.
In jiu jitsu, I have been watching John Danaher’s instructionals and interviews to supplement my mat-time experience. I avoided Danaher for a while because he’s such an “icon” of the jiu jitsu world, and I wanted to preserve my independent thinking and not hear what he wanted to say. After giving it some thought, though, I felt like I should at least give one of the greatest coaches of all time (so far) a chance, so I purchased his instructionals and started watching his Enter the System series about armbars (or, as he likes to say it, the juji gatame).
My initial thoughts:
Some details that Danaher gives are way out of my (current) level of interest.
I liked his hack about the “right/right/right” rule, but I really didn’t care for the long exposition about whether one should cross their ankles in an armbar (spoiler alert: the answer is that it “depends.”) To me, some content appears to be for the purpose of serving jiu jitsu nerds, not necessarily people who just want to do a successful armbar. I’ve recognized that I have certain preferences about how I want to absorb and digest the information, and that I don’t necessarily need to watch everything in order from beginning to end.
There’s tons more for me to learn about jiu jitsu, but I also do know a thing or two.
Some parts of the program were revelations to me, but also some parts of the program I had heard before from other coaches. However, I enjoyed getting the information whether or not it was new, because the diverse ways the ideas were expressed aids in my learning. Plus, it was fun to learn all of the unique Danaher-isms and store them away for future use in teaching. 📘
The mindmaps/flowcharts are good, but they aren’t quite real to me yet.
This is exactly the same problem I encountered while studying law. I could write out an outline of the law itself (or even pull it from a supplement!) but the real trickiness came in correctly identifying an issue on an exam. 😐 A law school exam always comes with a fact pattern where the professor has buried a trove of legal issues. Sometimes, a sentence in the fact pattern could trigger 3-5 more paragraphs of analysis. I think the more that I train in jiu jitsu, the more that I realize that I’m building this flowchart for me to use. However, just like in law school, it’s only in the application of these concepts do I really start to understand how they work for me.