I tend to spread myself fairly thin sometimes, juggling multiple hobbies and interests alongside my work and family commitments. This is especially apparent with health and fitness. In the last few months I’ve trained Brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA, taken up ballet, learnt to skydive, lifted weights at the gym, competed in a handful of triathlons, run an unofficial half marathon and ridden the Freeway Bike Hike. Some of these were free, like my midnight run around the river, but for everyone hobby there’s a fee attached.

Unfortunately it’s hard to fit all that I want to do into the time I have available, and that’s meant that my gym membership has been dormant for probably close to a few months. In our household we typically have the family money cover health and exercise related expenses, and whilst my membership is only $25 per fortnight, it’s money that I was wasting. It doesn’t come out of my weekly allowance, which I spend on things like coffee, comics and Lego, so I don’t feel it personally.

Inspired by Nat and Lisa‘s hockey team, I now fine myself $15 every Saturday if I don’t lift during the week. If I want to avoid the fine all I have to do is a few sets in the gym and I not only get the exercise benefit, but I save myself some cash.

In the 7 years that I’ve been training Brazilian jiu jitsu at The Academy of Mixed Martial Arts I’ve partaken in many grading nights. These sessions are one of the few times you’ll see formality at the club and represent the time when students are assessed. For a student, the result of these gradings is normally either minor progression, in the form of a tip, or a full progression to the next coloured belt.

Belts in Brazilian jiu jitsu are coloured from white to blue, then purple, brown and finally black. There are other belts beyond black, namely a red-and-black belt, and a red belt, but they’re so rare they may as well not exist. The five coloured belts are what most BJJ practitioners are familiar with and will encounter.

Each coloured belt has a number of tips (coloured stripes of fabric) that can be applied to show staged progression from one colour to the next. A white belt can gain up to four blue stripes before grading to a blue belt; a blue belt can gain three purple stripes before grading to a purple belt; a purple belt can gain two brown stripes before grading to a brown belt and lastly a brown belt can gain a single black stripe before grading to a black belt. Tips are not always issued, and instead students may jump from a single coloured belt to another, but that’s not as common.

Grading sessions at The Academy have never been used to determine a student’s position, but rather I’ve seen them as proof or evidence that a student is worthy of the next level, be it a tip or a new coloured belt. I haven’t heard of a student being asked to grade and then not passing, but it may have happened. If you’re asked by Adam to grade it’s because he believes you’re at the bottom of the next level.

When I graded through my white and early blue belt ranks, the process was much more formalised than we see these days. There was a formal syllabus and a student was required to demonstrate each move separately, be it a transition, sweep or submission. Upon reaching the full coloured belt, a student would demonstrate all the movements from the previous tip-gradings that led to the full belt. The grading for my blue belt comprised of me sitting a white-1, white-2, white-3 and white-4 grading back to back. They took a while.

Of late though the grading formats have changed. It has a much more laid-back, “Brazilian” approach. The mats are bursting at the seams with students of all rank and ability. As many as 15 pairs of grapplers take up a space usually reserved for half as many combatants, and all around the edge of the mats sit the overflow people awaiting their next roll. The expansion of the AMMA empire means that grading nights draw the satellite and affiliate clubs also, providing a lot of new people and new challenges. This is the part I like most about the current style of gradings - affectionally names “Smash Sessions.”

Typically during class if there’s a new person on the mat they’ll be a beginner. We do get visitors from other clubs, or people travelling through Perth, but the majority of new faces I see at The Academy are people wanting to try BJJ for the first time. At a Smash Session, all of the new faces have grappling skills too.

For each four-minute round a specific goal might be set or restriction applied. For example, you might be required to demonstrate a specific armlock or sweep, or only submit your opponent with a choke, or only attack from the mount position. The black-belts will typically wander between the pairs of grapplers, half observing the matches for the required moves and half acting as protective barriers – it gets cosy on the mats with so many people fighting for space and “senior belts always have the right of way.”

A discussion was raised online about increasing the frequency of our grading nights because of their popularity. At the moment we have them about once every three months. My opinion on this is that if we have Smash Sessions too often, be them grading nights or not, the appeal and fun will fade. We’ll have people justifying to themselves “it’s OK, I’ll go to next month’s session instead” if they have the option. I don’t want to see Smash Sessions become so regular they lose their charm. I also don’t see the affiliate clubs, some based as far away as Bunbury, making the trek to Perth every month. As I said, it’s these clubs attending that I like the most.

My vote: keep the sessions every three months, or introduce an additional event to partly cater for people’s desires. My current thought, which I might develop further: a whole-day event (maybe on a Sunday, or maybe over a weekend) where multiple coaches run multiple “streams” or sessions. Think of it as a BJJ conference. The goal would be to cross-pollenate between clubs and schools, and even styles.

If you train at The Academy, what do you think about the current grading sessions? What are your memories? If you train elsewhere, how does your club grade its students, and how do you feel about that?

Back in 2006, John Will was in Perth teaching a jiu-jitsu seminar at The Academy. Whilst I enjoy John’s BJJ teaching (he’s Australia’s most prolific BJJ instructor), I find his relaxed and informal conversations to be the real highlight of his visits. He tells incredibly interesting stories, and over the years he has developed a keen insight into  how people learn and develop. I think that this is what makes him excel as an individual within the BJJ community, more than any of his on-the-mat accomplishments.

It was during this seminar that he presented an idea which has stuck with me, and is largely responsible for forming my view of progression with respect to jiu-jitsu. I wrote about it then, but it has further solidified in my mind over the last 5 years.

Specifically, he highlighted that the difference between a beginner and an expert (a white belt versus a black belt) is their ability to acknowledge and respond to situations faster. His example revolved around a person wading into quick sand. The white belt would be up to their neck before they realised that it was dangerous, and from here it’s much harder to escape. In contrast, a black belt would dip their toe into the quick sand and immediately detect it as being unsafe. As such, their escape is much easier (or rather, is comprised of less steps).

I think this analogy really works well with jiu-jitsu, but I’ve used it personally to represent other situations in the past 5 years to great effect - it describes software development too. I think the visual images that are conjured are very easy to absorb and relate to.

This weekend John added what I consider to be the reverse analogy to his initial point, and whilst it’s not a new concept, it seemed to really click with me.

The idea is that nobody wakes up 40kgs overweight; it’s a gradual progression which results in you one day looking in the mirror and asking yourself “how the hell did I let this happen?” (I think this is another way of phrasing the “quick sand” analogy).

When you make the conscious decision to tackle your problem, it can seem insurmountable. It’s impossible to lose 40kg in a day, no matter how hard you work out (and presuming amputation is out of the question). However, it is possible to go for a run, watch what you eat and lose a kilogram by the time you go to bed. Wash, rinse, repeat and you’ll find yourself chipping away at the problem.

Another way of thinking about it is within the realm of finance – you can’t get out of $100,000 worth of debt in one day (unless you rob a bank), but you can save $200 fairly easily. Now the problem is only $99,800 and you’re making progress.

John labeled this as being a 5% improvement (don’t do the maths – it’s just an approximation ;)

When you’re up to your neck in quick sand, imagining yourself clear and free might be impossible, but imagining yourself in a position that’s a 5% improvement is well within your reach. So make that one little adjustment, and then reassess the situation to determine what the next 5% adjustment is.

I think the power in this is even more than John highlighted, because these adjustments will potentially reveal other pathways or opportunities that you didn’t see from the start.

Consider this: as you’re backing out of the quick sand you make your 5% adjustments and then bump into a tree root, hidden below the surface. Now you have a strong escape option that you simply couldn’t have foreseen when you were up to your eyes in trouble. It was the small escapes; the small adjustments that led to this saving option, but you’d have never found it unless you started that 5% journey.

Again, whilst I don’t think any of these concepts are necessarily revolutionary, they had a revolutionary impact on me back in 2006, and then again yesterday. Considering my hard work and effort was acknowledged with the awarding of a purple belt yesterday, it felt like that story – of getting into trouble, but then getting out again – was complete.

It felt like John gave me the other bookend.

On Saturday I attended BarCamp 4 at East Perth TAFE. It was a really well organised event (Matt and Darcy did a great job) and the content presented by the speakers was really engaging and interesting.

I saw Jessica Ender’s talk on form design as well as Samuel Spencer’s talk on the Australian Bureau of Statistics and their adoption of open data formats for delivering data sets to the public.

My talk was on after lunch, and I think me wandering around in a blue gi drew a little bit of attention (which if I’m being honest, I was banking on) and had people interested. Aaron helped me with the talk and received a few knocks to the head as thanks – his noggin was determined to meet the carpet-covered-concrete as often as it could.

I talked about the overlap I see between my jiu-jitsu training and every day business life, and my hope is that I’ll get the audience thinking about all the areas of their lives, which they may have previously considered insular or separate, and how they might in fact be connected and relevant.

I personally had a great time at the event, and The Frontier Group will be sponsoring it again in the future. I was disappointed that another engagement meant I couldn’t stay for the whole day, but I was very pleased with what I did get to partake in. There were a few of us pressuring Matt to plan for the next BarCamp in 6 months, but we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve uploaded the slides from my talk if you’d like to check them out.

Many of you will know that I train Brazilian jiu jitsu, and have done for some time now. I first became interested in BJJ, like many others, when I saw Royce Gracie’s dominating performances in the original UFC tournaments many years ago. A guy weighing 170lbs was able to defeat much heavier opponents by using joint locks and chokes instead of strikes. This was something that I could see myself enjoying, and so I took up BJJ.

Back then mixed martial arts, or MMA as it’s known, wasn’t super popular. In fact the sport was only just being invented, as various fighters began training across multiple disciplines, mixing strikes, wrestling and submission grappling to become a complete, rounded fighter. From the beginning, the TapouT brand has been associated with MMA, and I’d argue it’s become the defining brand, in the same way as Intel, Oakley and Coca-Cola each define their product space.

The three personalities behind TapouT were Charles “Mask” Lewis, Jr., Dan “Punkass” Caldwell and their tall friend Tim “SkySkrape” Katz. What’s with the nicknames you ask? That’s part of their catch, or gimmick, and it works pretty well. They each have larger-than-life characters that they play up to, and it’s given their business a highly appropriate public face. In March 2009, Mask was tragically killed in a car accident. The MMA world was full of grief, and the genuine friendships that Dan and Tim shared with Charles were exposed and explored for all to see. I was personally upset at the news, even though I’d never met Charles. At the recent MMA Awards, both Dan and Tim were still visibly moved when accepting awards on behalf of Mask and TapouT. They were a family, in all sense of the word.

As with all brands, when MMA hit the mainstream a few years ago, TapouT exploded. I started to see t-shirts popping up in day-to-day life; people in pubs or guys in the city – I even saw a bogan mum with TapouT head-to-toe the other day. It’s no longer a niche brand for those “in the know.” As with MMA, the brand is appealing to a large range of people now, and that’s not always a good thing. My fear is that MMA will become too popular and we’ll start to see the rules modified in ways that create a more exciting experience for the fans. What do I mean? More average people are watching MMA, and they want to see people slugging it out rather than rolling around on the floor. These kinds of people don’t necessarily understand the nuances of MMA and just want to see some fights, some blood and some knock outs. Check the footage of the crowd at any UFC event and you’ll see more blood-thirsty morons than ever before. And most of them are wearing a TapouT shirt.

Now that you’ve got some background, I can focus on my initial point – what drove me, personally, to buy a TapouT shirt. I don’t want to be associated with this meat-head culture, that’s for sure, so why dress like them?

There’s a few reasons, the first being that I feel like I have a better understanding of the TapouT company, including their intentions and influences, than the average person. I have watched a few TV series that the guys did where they highlight an up-and-coming fighter, and follow them through the preparation for their fight. In numerous cases, the humanity and genuine good will that Charles and the other guys showed was heart-warming. I hear the critics and cynics out there saying that they were just presenting a face for their show, and whilst that’s true to some degree, I never felt that it was manufactured. Often they’d genuinely help fighters, providing motivation, support, or even paying their rent in some cases. TapouT cares about MMA, because they were there at the birth. I admire that.

Secondly, I can relate to the almost whimsical approach the three friends had towards their business. Being a partner in a small business, I know how hard it can be to stay true to yourself, and not bend to other people’s expectations. The TapouT crew are eccentric, no doubt, and that’s hard to maintain when you’re running a business.

When people see me wearing a TapouT shirt, I want them to know the real reasons that I admire and respect the company. I want them to know that I am supporting, in my very small and own way, Mask’s legacy and his memory. I hate to sound like the guy that was “into the band before they were mainstream”; that’s not my intention. I want people to know that I’m supporting a brand because it supports a sport I love.

That probably won’t happen, and people will probably presume I’m just another meat-head who likes watching people get beaten up, but I can hope. Does this make sense, or do I just sound like an elitist?