Lex Fridman Podcast #343 – Roger Gracie

03/12/2022 Lex Fridman released a podcast with the greatest Jiu Jitsu competitor of ALL TIMES!                      And of course I wouldn’t skip that talk, because whenever greatness is talking, I listen.

The first thing that you can capture from the talk, is how calm and self assure is Roger Gracie, if you didn’t saw him fighting, you would understand that it is not a surprise, for him, your Jiu Jitsu is a mirror of who you are, a very agressive person will have a very agressive Jiu Jitsu, the same is with any personality, the cautions, the calm, the shy, the afraid, the irresponsible, the egomaniac even the psycopath haha and so on, so from that point only, you already can see how your Jiu Jitsu is relating to your own personality, and take advantage of that.

But with everything in life, we aren’t just one type, sometimes we are afraid, sometimes calm, sometimes agressive and that is good, the key is to understand the essence, the reason why you would change you way, what caused you to be agressive if you are a calm person, and attack that with logic, by doing this you will learn ALOT about yourself thru your Jiu Jitsu, just pay attention, or start a Jiu Jitsu journal not only about the techniques and sparring sessions, write your emotions as well what led you there.

Second great point is the self belief part of the journey, of course not everybody have to be a world champion, but the self belief thing is way larger than the competition, it is within you, every day, every time you are in a bad spot, a choke, under a heavy pressure on and off the mat, once you fixed your self belief, you’ll fall into that in a second, so if your self belief is a victim one, a weak one, a loser one, every time you feel like going under any kind of pressure you’ll return to that fucking sad self belief.

So what we do about that?? attack it, build your own self belief, know where you are right now,be honest with yourself, bullshiting isn’t going to help here, and then, only then, start building your new self, and work towards that no matter what people say, think or do, don’t matter what you think or say, but what you DO, if you want to create a self belief that you don’t ever give up, so start doing hard stuff, and finish them, and again, and again, and again….you got the point.

Third great point of this talk, is a technical position debate they had, Lex asked Roger what is the upmost dominant position in Jiu Jitsu, and Roger awnser surprised Lex, he said is the Mount, and its funny, because most people would argue that a good back control will give you the most dominant position, because your opponent dosen’t have any limb to attack, and few to defend, seems logical, but what Roger insisted upon was that even with a great back control, you are still under your opponent, and they have a great range of movement to try, whereas Mount pins your opponent down so effectively that even kids when playing, when a Mount is reached is almost impossible to get out, of course that when you know how to escape the Mount it becomes a harder taks, but he still is the upmost dominant position in Roger’s eyes and experience, and from there you have the Billion Dollar submission of Roger Gracie, the Cross-Collar Choke from Mount of course, he says that when your arms are in the spot, and you are in the mount, the chances of escape, or even survive are minimal if even there is one.

Our take on that one? WORK ON YOUR MOUNT CONTROL AND YOU CROSS COLLAR CHOKE! 

The forth and last poin I want to talk about (there is too much to cover and learn so you better listen to it by yourself!) is drilling, I was so happy that Lex talked to him about it, because is a strange area in the Jiu Jitsu world, some people are religious with their drilling and some aren’t all that about them, and what Roger said about it made perfect sense to me, his view on it is that the drilling part is the mechanical understandment of a technique and nothing more, the high reps have to be performed with a responsive training partner, not a dummy, with resistance so you can take what you learned within the drilling phase and bridge the errors by trials, but that dosen’t mean he dosen’t sees value in drilling, but its priority in training time is diferent.

The key is, drill as long as you NEED to understand the mechanical parts of a technique, after that start working on that technique with an active training partner, positional sparring are great for that, you start here and when you reached the goal or not, you reset, but with resistance, thus making the new technique yours with time.

Hope you find those interest points usefull, go and listen to the podcast and feel free to write down other things you took from that incredible talk, see you at the dojo, OSS!