When you can't train: Life has a way of throwing obstacles in our path. There will be many times when injury and circumstance will interrupt your ability to train. In most cases what this means is that you are temporarily unable to physically train your BODY – but this should not stop you from training your mind. There are many things you can do that don't involve the body. You can study great champions and learn from their example and potentially add some aspects of their game into yours. You can watch matches either on video or at your gym and follow the action mentally, placing yourself in the action on the side of one of the combatants and asking yourself second by second what you'd be doing differently out there and why. You can work some aspect of your physicality that, if it were to improve, your gym performance overall would also improve. So for example, if you had an injury to the leg, you could work rope climbs to develop grip strength that will benefit you when you resume grappling. When Gordon Ryan suffered a terrible knee injury six months before 2019 adcc most medical experts thought it was extremely unlikely he would be able to compete at all. For three months he came in every day to watch classes and we would quiz each other as we watched everyone train. When he finally got back on the mats his body was rusty but his jiu jitsu mind was sharper than ever. As soon as his body started moving properly his jiu jitsu looked better than before the injury due to the sharpness of his mental game. The mind governs and directs action. If the mind increases its powers during a lay off, the body will reveal Thais improvements as soon as it is able
