A note on competition prep -

Our Student Emanuel in his first ever competitive match, NJBJJF Spring Challenge 2025

“If ya don’t know, now ya know…” - The Notorious BIG

He wasn’t talking about competing in martial arts, but he could have been. I’ve trained Jiujitsu for ~10 years now, and I’ve done so at around forty schools. I travel for work a lot, trained in Ohio, trained in California, dropped in at places in Florida, all over Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Even made it to Salt Lake City and trained in the Mormon capital of the world (shoutout to Jon Cheng, not a Mormon, just a solid dude). This has given me a lot of perspective on what makes someone good at Jiujitsu, and I think it boils down to how seriously you take your training. If you take it seriously, you’re going to be better than peers of similar training time and similar size. How do you know if you take it seriously? Ask yourself a simple question - do I compete at least 4x a year?

If you do, you’re taking it seriously. If you don’t, it’s just a hobby. 

I’m not talking trash on hobbyists. I’ve been one myself, and when I’m older and my entire body is blown out from a lifetime of training, I’ll retire from the competition mats and go back to calling myself a hobbyist. Doing something simply because it brings you joy is one of the little pleasures in life, and many of my favorite training partners have zero intention of ever stepping foot on the competition mat. But those same people, if you asked them, would tell you that if they ever decided to compete, they’d probably do their normal training a bit differently in the weeks leading up to the competition. 

Now why is that? Why would a competition make you train differently? The answer is obvious, but it needs to be stated. The stakes are higher. You don’t want to step out on the mat and look foolish and get armbarred in twelve seconds and then have a long, quiet, contemplative drive home in your free t-shirt. At a minimum, you want to look like you belong out there. So if you’re going to “ramp up” your training in the weeks leading up to a competition, you know in the back of your head without the stakes of competition, you’d otherwise be taking it easier. 

We all have our own reasons for training. If you’ve never competed, I challenge you to try one. You’ll feel yourself start to care more. You’ll want to work harder, you’ll want to stay longer, and you’ll get more out of it.  You’ll feel yourself take it more seriously. And if you want to know what that feeling is like, there’s only one way to find out. 

See you on the mat!

-D