Reflections on my senior students: I am often asked about how different body types influence the way I coach students. I have talked about this in the past. A question I am asked much less often, but which is in my opinion more important, is that of TACTICAL STYLE and how that influences my coaching. When you look at my three senior competing students, it is obvious that they are physically very different, but more importantly, they are tactically very different as well. Gordon Ryan has a PRESSURE based game where that pressure elicits defensive reactions that create opportunity. Garry Tonon has a SCRAMBLE based game centered around using movement where he controls the direction and pace of that movement to create advantage. Eddie Cummings has a KUZUSHI based game where he works from bottom position to off balance people in ways that create advantage (Interestingly Mr Cummings game is the most similar to my own of the three). The great theme that I push to my students is this – WHATEVER DIFFERENCES THERE ARE IN TACTICAL STYLE, THE FINISHING POSITIONS ARE THE SAME FOR ALL. Thus my students may employ very different overall approaches to the game, yet all have very similar finishing holds. In this way I approach the great problem of SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE in jiu jitsu. How to reconcile the need to promote individualism and spontaneity whilst remaining true to the mechanical nature of the sport which is based around lever and fulcrum and whose strictures dictate the same way to all, regardless of difference. In this way jiu jitsu can function both as a means of self expression and as a humbling lesson in the primacy of physics over our wants and desires.
