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.

Jits Happens welcomes a guest blogger, CuppaJo, a woman cutting her teeth on the Jits. Here she helps us all understand why BJJ has been relatively unsuccessful building its female ranks, and what we can do to make it better. Take it away, Cuppa!
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Hello everyone, I'm CuppaJo, I'm a woman and I love to grapple.

[Hi Cuppa!]

Somehow, David (our beloved host here at Jits Happens) and I got into an email discussion about women and grappling. I found myself on the same soapbox I have been getting on the last few weeks over and over again when explaining my thoughts on why women don't grapple. David thought I should share them with all of you.

I'm pretty new to grappling. I have only been taking BJJ for the last 4 months so please understand that my perspective is that of a newcomer and not a long term grappler, or even a long-term Martial Artist, even though I did study Tukong Moosul for a bit as a kid. While I know there are many women that practice some form of Martial Art, the fighting arts have remained predominantly male. A friend of mine goes to a women-mostly non-profit Dojo in town (Karate - not BJJ) and I remember being rather surprised that such a thing could continue to exist over the long term. But still, I would never really feel uncomfortable or awkward taking Tae Kwon Do or anything. Lot's of women do it right? Then I decided to try BJJ, sort of assuming it was like the others, with a smaller, but dedicated group of women at each Dojo. You know, something like a 1 to 10 ratio. I honestly didn't even consider that I might be the only girl in the place. It turned out to be a rather poor assumption on my part. Though I cannot find documented evidence of this, I would put the ratio at closer to 1 in 25 or more. Why is BJJ even more predominantly male than other Martial Arts?

Since I have been doing this long enough now to really spend some time thinking about why BJJ doesn't have as high of a attraction or retention rate with women, I keep coming back to:

1. You almost need to break a magic threshold number to make a class where it is either women-only or there are enough women that you have at least two women show up every class. The reason I believe this is key is because...
2. Women don't wrestle around with other people as a natural part of their socialization. Little girls are discouraged from roughhousing types of behavior from a small age - even those that are encouraged to participate in sport. Boys are likewise schooled not to roughhouse with girls. When you add that to the general uncomfortable-ness of rolling around on the floor in close contact with members of the opposite sex who are little more than strangers I think most women just sort of drop out over time.
3. You also have to admit the sport can make you look like your spouse beats you - especially if you bruise easily. :)

I also want to throw in a note here about how hard BJJ can be for new practitioners. When you start you don't really know what you are doing, you don't know what everyone else is doing, and BJJ is not that intuitive. BJJ tends to be a much more 'relaxed' martial art when it comes to curriculum, traditions, and belt-testing. This leaves beginners with a vague idea of where they are going and how to get there, while fighting to just breathe -- much less win. Now imagine you are smaller and weaker than everyone else. It means you are probably going to spend the first year or so of your Jits life getting your rear kicked. I'm sure a lot of women just think “why am I paying for this?”

Martial Arts of most types are pretty boyzone - but the ones who do the best in attracting and retaining women tend to be pushing the self-defense angle pretty hard.

I also think that BJJs choke-out moves are really useful in self-defense situations. I may not want to arm-bar a guy attacking me because a broken arm may not incapacitate him - but choking someone out allows you to escape from the situation. Further, when most people are attacked they are so freaked out they are being attacked they can't actually do anything about it. All the rolling in BJJ gets you used to having someone trying to hurt you and helps teach you to remain calm and fight back.

BJJ could probably do more to attract women by doing self-defense seminars tailored to women and focusing more on defensive moves that incapacitate your attacker and get you out of danger -- rather than focusing on the sport of BJJ where we concentrate on point systems and the 101 ways to arm-bar in a weight-leveled competition. It would also be good to focus the techniques on negating strength and size differences. I think BJJ pays a lot of lip service to being good for women and for negating size and strength advantages, but I haven't seen very much in the way of technique modification to compensate for those differences or any real self-defense-focused curriculum.

The Fight Works Podcast has a great show on this topic (find it here) where Valerie Worthington (her blog is here) discusses it from her purple belt perspective. She talks about reasons she has been given when some guys refuse to roll with her, how to try and deal with those situations, body differences and “forgetting gender.”

So help a sister out! If you are a woman and have been thinking about trying BJJ - do it! Call your local BJJ studio and ask how many women they have attending. If you are a woman studying BJJ, recruit a friend! BJJ is a great workout and tons of fun and I feel pretty confident more and more women will come roll with us and bring their friends once they have an ally on the mats.

When I started in Submission Grappling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in 1995, the nearest ranked instructor in BJJ was Carlos Machado, who was over 200 miles away in Dallas, Texas. Carlos was busy traveling around the state helping build interest in the sport by running seminars. I remember seeing a flyer for a seminar he held in Austin in 1996. There was a quote on the flyer that left an impression on me as a newbie in the sport.

While this quote has been attributed variously to Rickson Gracie or Carlos’ brother Jean-Jacques, its impact on marketing the sport can't be questioned. Carlos opened the door to an inconceivable level of skill for Texans willing to commit to training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I took a pilgrimage up to his gym for the first time around 1997. It was a small room on the set of the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. It was a surreal walk through a darkened set (bar, living room, police station), meandering down a side hall, finally finding a small room full of guys sweating through one of Carlos’ legendary training sessions. To provide some context, I had recently gotten my second black belt in Karate after a 9 years in a sport characterized by overly formal (to the Westernized audience) or drill sergeant-like Karate instructors. Like a breath of fresh air, Carlos walked up to me, introduced himself, shook my hand, and was very welcoming and helpful.

Today, 13 years later, the Austin metropolitan area has at least 5 BJJ black belts about 1000 students of various rank. Many of us owe a debt of gratitude to Carlos for his continued commitment, good nature, and talent. We can all continue to learn from his example.

Read more about Carlos here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Machado.

Like most long-term endeavors, there are few significant milestones. In a sport like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where the journey from white to black belt only has 3 intermediate steps, the milestones are literally "few and far between." In my case, with 13 years in the making of my recent black belt promotion, simple math will tell you just how far those milestones were set apart.

Much of our time working though intense athletic effort is filled with small challenges, victories, incremental growth, and setbacks. Even if you train 4 times per week, go to every seminar and open mat available, and compete regularly, you will find long periods of time where getting over the smallest obstacle will challenge your resolve to continue the journey ahead. The harder you train, the more likely you will get injured. The more you cross-train with others, the more likely you will find someone who will kick your butt so regularly and with such domination, that you will likely wonder if you can ever get past them. I remember being a white belt, completely sore and beaten up from my previous training day, afraid to face the mats again, wondering if I should return for another brutal work-out. Of course, I returned, but was faced with this constant question for months. The sport is insanely challenging. Everyone you meet on the mats sees you as fresh meat. The target is on your back every single day. As your rank progresses, this target gets bigger.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu rewards people who can get past these big obstacles. The rewards are not just rank, but a knowledge base of skills that are broad and deep.

I remember a karate sensei of mine 20 years ago, in a moment of self-absorption, was boasting about how at his skill level, he could simply toy with his opponents "like a cat playing with a mouse." I was simultaneously disappointed that he shared this with his students and intrigued that a level of skill that advanced was attainable.

Rather than boast that I'm the biggest cat in the jungle, this promotion is a time to remember how many phenomenally talented athletes are in this amazing sport; many of them commanding a skill level that I can only hope to attain in my lifetime. I also hope that I have the ability to translate this wonderful sport into words capable of inspiring my students to stay on the long road. Don't focus on the milestones. Focus on the gifts that come from the hard work, every day you are on the mats: friendship, fitness, and the skills of a cat just a little bit bigger than it was yesterday.