"Wow, how'd we get here?" Wonders one of my students aloud as he pulls off his blindfold following fighting a match that took the grapplers, via a circuitous route, clear across the gym floor. "I thought we were still over there. That was disorienting! Cool!"

Disorienting, yes, but only visually so. Blindfolded grappling is a liberating experience. It's unusual to think of your visual reference as a crutch, but as a primary sense, it necessarily dulls the others from contributing to your responses during a match.

We keep a stack of tee shirts in my gym for these special occasions. When paired with a pair of ear guards, they make great blindfolds. I have yet to discover a blindfolding process that survives more than a half round of grappling, but the tee shirt and ear guards matchup is tight, light-proof, and cheap. At some point in the match, the honor system is invariably brought to bear, since the arrangement invariably loosens a bit. The match starts differently, of course. We have to pair up and kneel close to each other before putting on our blindfolds, or else hilarity will ensue as you seek out your opponent. Imagine the results shooting a single leg only to eat the wall behind them instead.

Despite these limits, blindfolded grappling allows you to tap into your senses for a more creative roll than you've enjoyed in a long time. When we roll blindfolded, you hear the usual grunts and umphs that accompany typical matches, but you also hear a lot of laughing and awe-inspired comments about the techniques which spring forth, unleashed by the creative release that seems to come with darkness. A complete lack of vision on the mats reveals more useful information about your surroundings, balance, and partner than you might find with the full use of your eyes. I have personally discovered, utterly surprised, brand new techniques that I wonder where they have been hiding.

Hiding in plain sight, you might say.

We are sitting in a circle, with 2 of my students grappling in the center. "Watch closely. We'll talk about what happened when they're done." As the two grapple, the students watch intently. After about a minute of hard work, there is a furious scramble through a twisting maze of positions, and one student suddenly taps. "Good match! Ok, what happened? What did you see?" I ask the group.

After a brief pause, one of the more eager students proclaims, "armbar."

"Ok, start at the beginning. Take us through the match."

Blank stares.

"Umm. They started standing. Then there was a takedown. Then he passed the guard, I think."

"Slow down. What about the details? What did they do when they were standing? How did the takedown get set up?"

This line of questioning continues until there is a clear timeline. With students around the edge of the mats, we have a good set of "camera angles" to replay the events, but their recollections are only as helpful as their perception. We work thorough the details and each transition is covered. We figure out where mistakes were made, how advantage was won and lost, and picked apart the match to my satisfaction. We dissect each moment of the match where an advantage is won or lost.

After several more matches, the students are getting the hang of it. They are doing much more than watching. They are seeing. "Great work! Now, everyone find a partner." People pair up, eager to use their newfound optics and awareness. In every match, there are turning points: moments where a subtle mistake is made, an opportunity taken, and the tide turns in favor of the victor.

Your memory is a good coach, but only if you have a good memory. Win or lose, remember the successes and failures that caused the outcome. The details of these memories can provide you with clues to success next time. Watch and feel the details of your matches. Talk about them with your partners and coaches afterwards. Get a camcorder on a tripod and record your matches. If someone gets a great move on you, ask them to take you through it again so you can burn it into your memory. I record every class at my gym. If there is a particularly interesting match, I'll load it up and watch it.

Seeing the big moves is easy. An understanding of subtleties, details and nuances separates the good from the great. Open your eyes.

"Never use the closed guard," I tell my students, "unless you are stalling or waiting to die." As I state this, I wonder about how this position became so fundamental only to be eventually thrown away so unceremoniously. Then I consider the never-ending stream of new techniques, positions, attacks, counter-attacks, and defenses generated in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and submission grappling over time. I think about some amazing technique I learned years ago as a blue belt and how it has been rendered ineffective and obsolete by the withering juggernaut of a thousand athletes pounding from all angles like velociraptors probing the electrical containment fences in Jurassic Park. I recall some fundamental progenitor move, originally defined in utterly simple steps, that have evolved into a broad category of richly varied options (e.g. the Rubber Guard). I reflect on certain positions, once considered inescapable by all but the most advanced, which are now easily thrown off by less experienced fighters. What's happening here? Is this natural acceleration or the result of a slow evolutionary process? And where are all these great new moves coming from?

Weak techniques will not survive. We know intuitively that techniques are successful only when they help win fights. Winning techniques are constantly studied by students of the sport. We adopt them, tweak them, make them work for their bodies, and transmit them to others. That's how we spend the bulk of our time on the mats.

A fighting sport evolves by the influences of social interaction and information theory. In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gödel. Escher. Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, author Douglas R. Hofstadter put a human spin on the mathematical concept of recursive enumeration. People come up with new ideas by watching the results of previous work and adapting. Repeat for a few generations, and some cool things start to happen. All of human civilization has developed using this process, gaining new insights from existing concepts. Over time, systems slowly evolve into more complexity and subtlety. Complexity is increased because past information and existing rules are applied to new situations.

On the mats, we take old ideas and challenge them repeatedly. The weak techniques die off or morph into variations that are more successful in different situations. The media, usually blamed for dumbing down the masses, expands our information horizon and accelerates the speed of ideas flowing through what I call the Jiu-Jitsu diaspora. As it flows through, it is interpreted, tuned, adapted, mutated, then reflected slightly improved, back out the global information channel. New ideas are literally created from old information. Like an infinite tapestry, we weave the fabric of Jiu-Jitsu every time we step on the mats.

A long time ago, I was a white belt who had just joined a new BJJ school that had moved to the area. Sitting in a circle after a technique was shared with the class, a student raised his hand and asked "how do you escape that move?" The instructor's answer: "That'll cost you $90 and take an hour of my time." The joke, which wasn't a joke at all, it turns out, was that the student could only learn that information by paying for a private lesson, and the student group wasn't worthy of the treasured secrets of this genius. The first time I heard that response, I laughed. But my chuckle was cut short when I realized he was serious. Over time, I saw the same pattern that the other students had already seen. The student would feel like an idiot for asking the question, the private lesson would never happen, and the answer to the question never spoken.

What would you do if you asked the question? Would you be likely to raise your hand next time? Over time, the intended effect unfolded at the gym: people rarely asked questions of the head instructor. Since questions often shape curriculum, an absence of inquiry left the instructor to teach only what he wanted to teach. Students with questions would seek each other out for information. The questions didn't go away, they were redirected to less qualified, but more helpful people. This was in the age before YouTube and storefulls of DVDs and textbooks on BJJ. This instructor had a stranglehold on information. Hearing him respond to a question with such an absurd evasion reminded me of working with an IT helpdesk guy who acts like his knowing how to install Microsoft Office was a birthright.

In a more recent example, a friend training at another gym had been keeping a nifty online technique notebook. Not a lot of detail, but very helpful perspective intended to feed the hungry Jiu-Jitsu diaspora. Their instructor caught wind of the website and was uncomfortable. The concern was that it might help competitors. The web site no longer discusses Jiu-Jitsu technique. Let's say the web page was discussing what this student learned about executing a take-down. Can you imagine some morsel of information being divulged that would somehow alter the competitive landscape? Google "double leg take-down." Tell me there could have been something truly original in the web site's description of this technique that will harm this coach's business. No, and that wasn't the point of the website. Learning and communicating is a personal process that takes the student beyond the boundaries of the mats. This student was stuck in a stranglehold of censorship.

These two situtions, separated by a decade of time and completely different instructor lineage, illustrates what is commonplace in this sport. Some instructors treat information like a valuable commodity in a world where it is already free.

Information isn't power. In the information-connected economy, the kinds of businesses that can get away with treating information as a valuable commodity are rapidly becoming as old as your Dad's Wall Street Journal curbside dropoff. And don't get me into an ad revenue argument since it's so far off the point.

Over the years on the mats, I've come up with some really sweet moves. I can find dozens of videos on the Internet of guys who have come up with the same moves on their own. They've given them their own silly names like "De-goitering the Goat" or "Feed the baby" but the moves are the same. This is a healthy sign of a exploding system with a spirit of innovation, expansion, and sharing.

Coaches: hide your secrets at your own peril. Students are passionate about this sport and hungry for information. They'll go get the answers with or without you. Be the leader and coach you are supposed to be and teach them what you know. By keeping secret techniques, you won't be forced to learn anything new. Holding back your techniques makes you stale and dumb, not smarter than the rest of the crowd. Teach your students everything you know so they can challenge you to come up with new ideas. You were the smarty pants who figured those old secrets out to begin with, right? So, go make up some new ones.

I love witnessing the process in action. Every few months, I drop some new technique on my students that usually starts with all of them tapping and freaking out about "what the hell was that?" We cover it in class, repeatedly. A month later, some of them are starting to figure it out and execute it on their own. After 6 months, the technique is old hat: we've figured out 6 variations, mastered a few of them, and know 10 ways to shut it down. Being the only person who knows how to execute the Biggie Slicer is as boring as playing Quake III in God mode. The splatter and spray of guts are fun for a while, but you are left wanting someone who can scare you into getting better.

Every time I get a visiting instructor on my mats, I make it a point to teach something I don't expect him to know. By "liberating this technique into the wild," I'm sure to have to get much better at executing it, discovering defenses, and variations. That's how this sport keeps moving, and that's how the best athletes in the sport keep growing.

The smartest guy in the room is only as smart as the information he's capable of teaching the group. Prove you're smart: give it away, now.

I've trained various styles of martial arts for over 24 years now and am currently training BJJ at Austin Jiu Jitsu. BJJ is by far the most effective art I've found, but I've noticed a "problem" in the BJJ culture. The problem is that BJJ is taught in a sort of "all or nothing" manner. When a new student comes in, they are taught techniques during the instruction part of a workout then thrown on the mat with more advanced students who proceed to dominate them and defeat every attempt made at applying techniques they are just learning. BJJ has a culture of "dominate or be dominated". The beginning student has to endure lots of discouragement until the day that a newer student comes in and the beginner can finally dominate someone else. This sets up a culture of competition where one can only gain "success" at the expense of another's discouragement.

There needs to be a middle ground between the instruction part of a workout and the sparring part. Austin Jiu Jitsu has addressed this need by introducing "Mentor Rolling". During mentor rolling, advanced students are paired with beginners and they enter a live rolling session, only the mentor coaches or guides the beginner as they roll with them. The mentor pushes the beginner and rolls at the level equal to what he/she can handle but doesn't dominate. The mentor gives opportunities for the beginner to succeed, but may defend many of the attempts at submission if they are sloppy. When the time is right in the session, the mentor provides an opening and the beginner is allowed to secure a submission if the attempt is solid.

What do you think? Comment and let us know.