Insight and direction: I am a big believer in the value of having a primary coach in your developmental years – one person who creates a strong fundamental game and an overall approach to the sport with progress over time. I am also a big believer in the value of occasional alternative points of view to add new insight and perspective that can make you investigate new areas of the sport. As a beginning student I was very fortunate to have the best of both. My primary coach was of course, Renzo Gracie. As you know, he is a he is a jiu jitsu icon running one of the biggest academies in the world in one of the world's premier cities – so we had many extremely distinguished guests over the years. Many of these outstanding individuals had an impact upon me and my approach to the game. I would be doing you all a disservice if I did not talk about them in future posts so that you can learn from their insights as I did. Most importantly, we can look at different modes of teaching. Our daily teaching from our primary coaches is usually technical in nature. The value of visitors is not so much technical – they typically are not there long enough to make significant technical contributions to any more than small parts of your game – their real value is in the NEW PERSPECTIVE they offer and how this can make you think and progress in new directions – LONG AFTER THE VISITOR IS GONE. When I was a blue belt, the great Dean Lister visited our academy. If I remember correctly, he was a brown belt at the time, doing well at local tournaments, but not yet the 2X ADCC champion he would later become. Mr Lister had very powerful Achilles locks and knee bars at that time – he had not yet fully developed the heel hook game he later used so successfully. When speaking to us he spoke of the usefulness of leg attacks in his game. At that time this was VERY unorthodox. He said something like, upper body or lower body- a tap is a tap and a tap is a win.” That one sentence stuck with me and as I rode the NYC subway home that night – my mind was racing with possibilities. From that day I began the study of lower body submissions and a whole new door opened.”
