The Weakness Hiding in Your Jiu Jitsu
If I were to point to a single concept that is absolutely critical for continued growth in pretty much any area of life, especially jiu jitsu , it would be this: Test yourself to failure. The reason why is that this is fundamental to human knowledge itself; it was pointed out as far back as Aristotle that to truly understand a concept, you must know both sides of the coin, so to speak. I can hold a penny in my hand, and only see the tails, but the only reason I even know which side is tails or what “tails” even is, is because I know the other side has heads. In systems science terminology, you must know both sides of a system boundary to know that it is in fact a boundary, and then you can truly profess to understand the component that you are studying. There is a top-down as well as a bottom-up quality to knowledge, and this extends naturally into physical training. To use a more personal example, when training on the mat in boxing or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the results of progress ar...