Last Wednesday, I was excited to visit Sterling, VA for a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu seminar with the legendary Rickson Gracie. 

I set out Wednesday morning at 8am from Connecticut, and without making any stops I arrived at the seminar location around 3pm.  The seminar was scheduled to run from 5pm-10pm, so I had time to snag some bananas and a drink with plenty of time to rest and stretch before things got rolling.

To begin with, the Academy is beautiful.  I didn’t realize until later that it was their Grand Opening that day, but it was impressive.  The main mat room looked around 3,000 square feet, and there were several smaller rooms with a few hundred sq feet of mat space each. 

I couldn’t imagine that we’d need all that room, since they’d announced that the seminar was limited to 50 people.  As it turns out, they changed that number to 200, because that’s how many people showed up (and they were all pre-registered). 

Rickson began the seminar by welcoming everyone and inviting us to ask questions about what he showed—as he put it, “How often are you and I both here?  Take advantage of it.” 

He then began the instruction like this:  “I’ve never fought MMA.”  A lot of puzzled looks went around the room—we were all pretty sure we’ve seen a lot of footage to the contrary.  “MMA is in a cage, and I haven’t done that,” he continued.  “Three 5-minute rounds...I haven’t done that either.  My style wasn’t for those kinds of matches—I would be patient and use good defense until he made a mistake.  These guys who compete in this today are different kinds of guys than we used to have.  They go, they fight, the bell rings, they go back to their corner, recover, they fight again.  It’s a different kind of athlete and game than it used to be.”

Bombshell number 2:  “I don’t think you should cross-train for MMA.”  That one received more quizzical looks from the crowd.  “You’re not gonna go box for 6 months and then stand with Anderson Silva.  Instead, you need to learn to defend his boxing, maybe learn to move your head and block punches.  Go learn to defend wrestling for a fight with GSP, but you’re not going to outwrestle him.  You need to be patient, to make yourself invincible against their strengths, and then wait until the chance to be the better jiu-jitsu guy, and when it happens you finish.” 

With that, he segued right into the first technique of the day.  In 5 hours, he taught only 10 techniques, which I really appreciated.  I’ve been to the “shotgun style” seminars in which a black belt teaches 100 techniques in 2 hours and you leave remembering nothing.  Rickson wanted to cover only the most important things. 

The teaching style was familiar to anyone who has trained at a Gracie family academy before.  He would pick a partner, usually a brown or black belt, and instruct them to do something simple:  “Clinch with me” or “armbar from guard” or “elbow escape”.  It would, of course, go poorly for them, and for the next couple of partners as well.  After a couple people attempt it, someone would get close.  “This guy hears the ringing but he can’t see the bell,” Rickson quipped a couple times.  “Switch with me and I show you.”  From there, he’d show the main component, from his thinking, behind the success of the technique.  Often these were things that were difficult to see, and he called them his “invisible jiu-jitsu” a couple times. 

Around the halfway point to the evening, we took a 15 minute break, and coming back there was a highlight video shown on a projector.  Following this, Rickson gave a lecture for about an hour on the importance of breathing in his jiu-jitsu and in his life, and on how he understands his connection, as a human being, to other animals.

I should note here that Rickson is a very charismatic instructor, and has a few funny conventions.  One of them that I noticed early in the day was that, without explanation at the time, he was referring to his partner as a zebra.  “When the zebra put his arm here, you do this.”  I’m sorry, did he just say ‘zebra’???  In his discussion of breathing and centeredness, he finally explained this, in part of a response to a question:  “When you watch a lion hunt, he sits in the shade and rests.  He watches the zebras go by, and he doesn’t get excited or angry.  But when one of the zebra comes too close, he is quick and aggressive making his kill.  It’s not emotional, but it’s aggressive, it’s final.  When you compete, you don’t look across the mat and see another lion—you see a zebra.” 

Late in the day, Rickson spoke about his reasons for teaching these seminars publicly:  “I used to save this stuff for my family, for my close students, for my team.  But now as I get older, I see my responsibility to help the whole jiu-jitsu world grow.  I see things get lost, guys don’t know the best way to do things anymore.  Or I find new changes that make them better.  So I used to hide these things so that only my friends could win.  Now, I feel like that’s not big enough.  We get old, we stop competing, and if we don’t share these things, then nobody will have them.  People ask me why I never put out a book or DVD, and share that way, to make money from it.  To come here today, you pay respect to me.  I see your face, and you see mine, and that shows respect.  So I am happy to show you what I can about my jiu-jitsu.  But if I put a book on the shelf in every store, then my worst enemy can go buy one, read my book, and see my jiu-jitsu, without showing me any respect.” 

For that reason, I haven’t described the techniques that he taught at the seminar.  I’d like to say a few things about them, to give you an idea what was included, but I won’t be sharing details about how they were taught or changed.

We began with entering the clinch from standing against a striking opponent.  We went on to initiating the clinch from our own strike.  We learned how not to be off-balanced (or even moved) by someone who grips us and tries to push and pull us out of our base.  We covered the Upa mount escape, as well as the elbow-knee.  We also saw the elbow-knee from a sort of modified scarf hold.  We did the armbar from guard, and the scissor sweep.  We learned a method of escaping the front headlock from the knees, and we went to our knees under the side.  Those were our ten.  There was nothing flashy or crazy.  But it was solid, and we learned something important with each one.

There was distinctly a method to the selection of the techniques, and the order in which they were taught.  If you looked only at the core component he emphasized with each one, it was almost the same—it just changed a tiny bit with each successive technique.  And as you may already have imagined, all of them revolved around the hip’s connection to the rest of the body. 

At the seminar’s conclusion, Rickson set up the group photo, and then graciously posed for individual photos with everyone who wanted one.  He set up a line and a photographer so that he could move through them quickly.  I was fortunate enough to be near the front, and I can’t imagine how long that went on—when I left, even after changing and writing some notes, the line was still massive. 

My review has been fairly glowing, which is probably appropriate.  There were a handful of strange events, a few questions he didn’t want to answer, and one that he did answer that was particularly strange from my perspective.  But it was an enlightening event, and sometimes it’s nice to see how the master operates—how he thinks about his craft, and how he shares it with others. 

Thanks for reading.

~Chris