Eric Fried, Author at Team Renzo Gracie Taylor

Caring for our Mats

January 2, 2020 By Eric Fried

The very first bullet on our Class Rules & Etiquette page says:

No shoes on the mat! No bare feet off the mat!

This is so important that I felt the need to dedicate a whole page to it.

Remember that game you used to play as a kid, The Floor is Lava? It’s like that, except the mats are the safe zone, and the rest of the world is the lava. But instead of lava, think of it as a cesspool of broken glass and ringworm.

To break that down, this rule is in place for two reasons:

To protect the people

In the oh-so-eloquent words of my professor, Mario Esfiha:

Sh*t on the ground; sh*t on your feet; sh*t on the mats; sh*t on my face.

We clean the mats thoroughly and carefully. The floors, not so much. The rest of the world, not at all. We’re aggressively grinding every exposed skin surface into these mats for hours at a time. So please:

Assume everything outside of the actual mat surface is crawling with ringworm, impetigo, staph/MRSA, and other nasties — not to mention blood, urine, vomit, feces, and every other not-necessarily-infectious-but-still-thoroughly-gross substance imaginable.
Assume these horrible things adhere instantly to anything they touch, including the soles of your shoes and/or feet.
Assume these horrible things look for any opportunity to transfer from said soles to the mat surface, and thence to your face.
Step out of your shoes when you step onto the mats.
Step into your shoes when you step off the mats.

To protect the mats

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Cost/maintenance. Mats are expensive. Really expensive. I’m not a big corporation or school district with a five-figure budget. I’m just a hobbyist. If my mats die, the bill is mine.
Mats are also a pain to care for.
If you have rocks or glass wedged in your shoe, you can puncture the mat surface just by stepping on it. Now I have to figure out how to patch it, or possibly decide to replace it.
Even normal dust and grit, tracked in from your shoes or your feet, will gradually wear away at the mat surface like sandpaper, reducing their lifespan.
The longer the mats last, the longer I can go without replacing them. This keeps me happy and improves my chances of staying afloat as a business.
Health. Grit on the mats can damage not just the mats, but the skin (and clothing) that grinds against it. Scratches and cuts, on both skin and vinyl, harbor nasties more effectively, even if they’re too small to see.

So again, assume everything outside of the mat surface is a tiny razor blade just looking for an opportunity to cut my mats and your face, and avoid tracking it across the border.

In addition to foot traffic, it is also important to make sure things like jewelry, zippers, and other sharp objects stay off the mats.

How to clean the mats

Dust. Otherwise when you spray and mop, you’re making mud and leaving grit on the mats.
Use the white fluffy mop head:

Try to snake it in a continuous pattern, without lifting the mop, to get rid of as much dust, hair, etc. as possible.
Clean the duster. The duster can only hold so much crud, and we don’t want to put it back on the mats next time.
Take the mop head outside and shake, bang, and slap it until it looks pretty much white again.
Spray. The cleaning solution is designed to murder the nasty stuff we talked about above. How much should you spray? Enough that when you do step #4, the whole surface is wet with no gaps; but no so much that you wind up with puddles.
If you need to make more solution, use 4oz of concentrate (there’s a metal measuring cup with a line on it) and fill the sprayer to the “max” line with water.
Mop. Use the blue mop head:

Again, use a continuous motion, without lifting the mop. Walk backwards so you’re not leaving icky and ugly footprints.
Let dry. If you used the right amount of cleaner in step #3, this should take about 10 minutes. Don’t let anyone or anything back on the mats until they’ve dried.

I’m Not A Weapon

March 7, 2016 By Eric Fried

As I get more advanced in BJJ, people sometimes ask me if I’ll have to register my body as a weapon. My answer is always “no”, but I’ve never been able to explain why. Well, it came to me this morning. It happened like this:

See, my workplace forbids weapons of any kind. I’ve always had a Swiss army knife in my drawer, and it often comes in quite handy. And every time I use it, I think about what I would say if confronted by some officious official espousing the no-weapons rule: I would say it’s not a weapon; it’s a tool.

So this morning, as I was using the pliers to pull a twisted staple out of my carpet (loathe building 45), this apothegm came back to me as a perfect response to the BJJ-practitioner-as-weapon question:

I’m not a weapon. I’m a tool.

On the Move-Of-The-Day Prize/Penalty

March 1, 2016 By Eric Fried

In the academy in which I spent my first four-ish years (white to purple), we had this rule: During free rolling after instructional, if you successfully executed the “move of the day” (whatever was taught during instructional), your partner would have to do ten pushups after the round. (Didn’t count if the MOTDer was the instructor.) In my current academy, there is no such rule.

I come before you today to discuss the relative merits of such a practice.

Pro: It’s kinda fun. There’s good camaraderie to be had. Good-natured ribbing from the rest of the class when someone’s doing pushups between rounds. Congratulations to the MOTDer.

Pro: It makes you work for it. Your partner doesn’t want to do pushups. (Not because ten pushups is soooo hard; it’s the pride thing.) So if you get the MOTD, you know you really got it.

Unless…

Con: If there’s a significant skill (or size/strength) disparity, achieving MOTD may be trivial for one partner and impossible for the other. In this situation, the lesser player has no incentive to go for MOTD because it’ll certainly be stuffed; and the greater player would just be bullying the lesser by going for it and getting it time after time.

Let’s take a step back for a sec. I feel it’s indisputable that we want to encourage MOTD attempts during the free rolls after said move is taught. More reps, in a more dynamic and aggressive environment, will help to solidify and hone the technique.

So under what circumstances does the pushup rule encourage or discourage MOTD attempts? I posit: encourage when skills are evenly matched; discourage when they are not.

To be a good training partner, the greater grappler in a heavily mismatched roll should allow the lesser to attempt – and even finish – techniques. Particularly the MOTD, for the reinforcement reasons noted above. Some folks have too big an ego for this (I encourage you to surround yourself with at least some high-level/low-ego grapplers) – but add pushups to the mix, and even the humblest high-level folks are going to be much less likely to concede MOTD. This makes the lesser player unlikely to try, and therefore unlikely to reap the benefits of that extra practice.

What to do? Chart out which matchups are close enough to make the pushup rule a positive, and enforce it only for those match-ups? Gah! Too much overhead.

So I think I’m going to try it out this way: allow – and even encourage – my students to agree before rolling, between the two of them, whether the pushup rule will be in force. (Sort of like partners agreeing whether leglocks are kosher.)

Your thoughts and opinions are encouraged.