Those Who Forgot How to Play
Tonight one of my students got reinjured rolling with another student, and I couldn't help being extremely frustrated. It wasn't some freak accident. It was the kind of injury you can see coming from across the room, the kind I've watched happen more times than I can count, and sometimes it feels like nobody gets it.
The adult program is where you see what a lifetime of not playing turns into. Feeling like a stranger in your own body and never really learning to see the world from somebody else's point of view, all of it shows up the minute two grown-ups slap hands and start rolling.
Adults forgot how to play.
It's also why so many people are scared to try jiu jitsu in the first place. When you're at the BBQ trying to talk your cousin Theo into coming to a class and he comes up with a million excuses, it probably isn't his schedule or his bad hip. He’s scared. He thinks he's going to get hurt, and given what goes on in a lot of gyms, he's not crazy. Most adults who walk into my gym have never done any real rough and tumble play, and if they did the last time was probably when they were ten, so they show up with no idea what their adult body can do to another body. And that to me is the first lesson of jiu jitsu: learning the consequences of your own force and the responsibility that comes with it.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood the playing stops. Kids go from playing nearly every day to serious stuff like attracting a mate and partying and making money, everything gets real serious real fast, and they slowly forget how they learned anything at all, which was likely through play, boundaries, and exploration. You can see it when somebody joins the gym after years or even decades away from any sport. The minute they start rolling it's obvious they're lost. They can't read discomfort or taper their force or adjust themselves to the person in front of them, and when their partner fumbles those same things they may punish them for it emotionally. Piaget had a word for the childhood version of this, egocentrism, a young kid's difficulty seeing the world from anyone else's point of view. I'm not saying grown-ups are literally stuck at that stage, but plenty of them still run into the same basic problem the second the pressure's on.
Here's the part I think a lot of people get wrong, coaches included. I don't think most adults are really focused on winning. They're focused on saving face, avoiding looking foolish, proving something to themselves, holding onto their status in the room, or using their partners to work out their own private theory of fighting that’s usually a mixture of John Wick and UFC. Winning is just the mask all of that wears. And competitiveness isn't the problem. I'm competitive, most good grapplers are. The problem starts when protecting who you think you are gets louder than the person underneath you and the game you're both supposed to be playing.
I've watched people train with their own friends like this. They're the nicest person in the world before class and a complete animal once the round starts, throwing every ounce of attribute they've got at their buddy like they’re drunk outside of a bar. I've seen people on the verge of tears in a roll with somebody who isn't paying any attention to them at all, like they're rolling with a nameless, faceless shadow creature. And the person doing it usually has no idea. You might be thinking that's not you.
I would've said the same thing once.
When I was a young, strong, athletic, extremely handsome and competitive white belt, I rolled with a 40+ year-old female black belt at my gym. In my head she was a black belt who could kill me with a death touch, so I had to fight like hell to defend myself. I had no idea at the time how socially clueless that was, and nobody had ever taught me a thing about accommodation. After the roll she looked me dead in the eye and said she'd never roll with me again unless I was a brown belt.
That crushed me. I didn't know exactly what I'd done but I knew it was bad. She wasn't being mean. She was protecting her ability to show up the next day and roll, and she wasn't about to let anybody jeopardize that, least of all a white belt fighting for his life against nothing. That was the day my whole orientation changed. I'd been trying to prove I belonged on the mat with her, and from then on I was trying to learn how to train with her. I made it my business to learn to roll with everybody and curb my attributes, and a few months later, after earning her trust, she rolled with me again and told me how technical I'd gotten and how pleasant the roll was.
Psychologists who study motivation have language for what changed in me. They talk about a performance orientation versus a mastery orientation. With a performance orientation you're mostly trying to look competent, or at least not look incompetent, so every round turns into a verdict on who you are. With a mastery orientation you're trying to get better, so a round is just information. The performance guy can't afford to lose, so he either goes to war or finds a way out, and adults are really good at disguising the way out. There's the guy who suddenly has a tweak in his shoulder the second he ends up in a bad position, or the gal who only wants to roll with people she knows she can beat. My personal favorite is the guy who gives you a suggestion on how to make the choke you have him in tighter.
You can't fake a mastery orientation for very long because the mat keeps testing it. You get tapped by someone smaller than you or corrected in front of the whole class, and if you're there to protect your image that feels like an attack, and if you're there to learn it's the lesson. It means letting reality revise you, and most adults have spent years arranging their lives so that doesn't happen much.
It's also why one of the hardest things about coaching adults is getting them to listen. A lot of people come in and treat the academy like their own private studio. They want you to show them the moves so they can put their own spin on them and go test them out on whoever's next to them, making up their own version of the game while twenty other people are trying to play the same one. But a jiu jitsu room only works because everybody is operating under a shared set of constraints, most of which aren’t written on the wall. How hard you apply something. How quickly you move. What you do when somebody is trapped somewhere awkward. When to keep going and when to back off. Those rules are what make it possible for a room full of people to practice hurting each other without hurting each other.
And your partner isn’t an obstacle or a tool for practicing your game. They’re the best source of information in the room. Every reaction they have is feedback and every adjustment they make shows you something you didn’t know, which is why jiu jitsu takes an insane amount of observation. You have to watch other people roll, and you have to watch the person you’re rolling with the whole time you’re rolling with them.
The academy is not a collection of individual training sessions happening in parallel. It is one shared ecology. Why do you think the black belts tend to sit at the top of the chain in most rooms. It isn’t because they know more techniques. It’s because at their best, they’re aware of the whole room. They know who they can push, who they need to protect, who needs room to work, who is getting frustrated, who is exhausted, and how their behavior changes what everyone else gets to experience.
Eventually skill and awareness become more difficult to separate. The better you understand the game, the more people you can play with, and the more people you can play it with, the more of the game becomes available to you.
In short, a black belt isn’t just someone who can impose their game on almost anybody. It’s someone who can have a useful game with almost anybody.
The way I see it there are three games going on in jiu jitsu, and each one asks a different question. The lowest is the outcome game, and the question there is can I beat you? That's where most people are, and it treats the other person as a means to an end even if you love them as a teammate. What’s just as revealing is what people do when they don’t believe they can beat someone. They may avoid the round, turn it into a survival game, make excuses, shut down, or start looking for some other way to protect themselves from what losing might mean.
Above that is the game itself, where the question becomes can I understand this thing and get really good at it? I don’t believe a lot of people make it to this point, and if they do, they don’t always stay there. It’s easy to retreat back to the outcome game the moment your ego gets threatened.
The highest game is human development. I call it the meta game, the game above the game, and the question there is what is this game asking me to become?
A mastery orientation is what moves you from the first game to the second, and it can carry you a long way. Marcelo Garcia is about as good an example of the game itself at its highest level as there is. He was known for letting people out of positions on purpose just to see what would happen next, often finding his way into something even more dominant. He was also obsessed with finding the best jiu jitsu, even if it meant abandoning something he liked. Most people don’t know that Marcelo was once a deep half player. He was a master at pivoting.
You can't play like that if you're stuck in the outcome game or so attached to your A game that you'd never dare let it go long enough to discover something better. That's real mastery, and it's rare.
But it isn't the highest game yet.
Plenty of people are technically excellent and still selfish, unsafe, or miserable to train with. Mastery is necessary, it just isn't enough.
The highest game starts when your idea of getting better grows to include other people. Eventually the question stops being only how much of this game you can understand and becomes how much of yourself you can govern so somebody else can learn too. You see it happen to a lot of good competitors when they start teaching, or when they learn to give a newer partner a round that's actually productive for them. They start caring about the conditions that let everybody keep playing, and that pulls them up into the highest game whether they planned on it or not.
Most adults come in with pretty self-centered goals. They want to prove something to themselves or learn self-defense or get in shape. Those aren't bad goals, but they have to get absorbed pretty quickly into higher ones that still include them, because jiu jitsu in a vacuum is extremely dangerous and only thinking about yourself is a good way to get you or somebody else hurt. This is one of those constraints that isn’t immediately noticeable, but it’s also one of the things that sharpens your technique. You can’t just keep turning the intensity up, so you have to get better. You trade maximum intensity for maximum playability, because the longer the game stays playable the more chances everybody gets to become dangerous. Some people think that's watering jiu jitsu down if every day isn’t porrada. I think it's watering it, the kind that lets skill grow faster.
If we actually fought every night there'd be nobody left in the gym after a week. One week of king-of-the-hill, where the black belt gets up from the carnage and hands the keys right back to the landlord. That never seems to occur to the people who come in wanting to learn how to fight and then proceed to bring the fight to every roll. I’ve had a lot of guys like this. They come in gung ho and go to war every single round, because they figure training as real as possible is the fastest way to get good. They never last longer than six months. And in that six months, they spend most of it out with something snapped, crackled, or popped. They come for self-defense, and leave with the lesson, maybe, of what it actually costs to get into a fight. The guys chasing the most realism end up with the least skill because they couldn't stay in the game long enough to develop any.
They think the constraints in jiu jitsu were just no punching and no slamming. Those are only the obvious ones. The deeper constraints are the ones nobody teaches: tapering your force, giving people time to tap, controlling how fast you accelerate into something, noticing when somebody's vulnerable, respecting that the person in front of you might be smaller or older or newer, and repairing things when you make a mistake. That's what jiu jitsu is really teaching, contrary to popular belief. It isn't teaching you how to hurt people. If it were, nobody would have training partners. It's teaching you the qualities that should govern force, awareness, judgment, restraint, responsibility, and, enough control that you can use force when you need it and withold it when you don't. You can't train with everyone the same way, and it isn't always appropriate to hurt somebody even in a real altercation.
Unskilled people often have only two settings: on and off. Skilled people have a dial. Your goal should be to roll with a competitive brown belt, a 100-lb beginner, a 65-year-old hobbyist, a child, and a terrified first week student without becoming a different person, getting bored, or abandoning jiu jitsu. You should learn how to change the dosage, the pace, the goals, the openings you allow, the risks you take, and the amount of force you use.
The word here is command. Not just command over the other person, but command over yourself, the interaction, and the amount of jiu jitsu the moment actually requires. Skill is command over the whole situation.
The problem in most gyms is that people think they have command once they've learned a few techniques, and then they throw every attribute they have into the gaps. Strength covers for bad base and speed covers for bad timing, and it works just well enough that they never find out where the gaps are in their skill and character. Their partners find out for them.
Sometimes I think people are legitimately trying, without realizing it, to take their training partners out one at a time to see who's the last man or woman standing. They shrink their own education and their own environment doing it, and then complain that there is nobody left to train with. The gal who only ever wants to be on top never learns to escape, and one day she'll run into somebody just as good as she is and find out the hard way that half the art is missing. And if it takes seven to ten years to get a black belt, there's no getting there for the guy who keeps getting hurt or keeps running out of people willing to roll with him.
None of this means going easy. Accommodation isn't charity, it's a higher skill. You're adjusting your force and speed and goals and risk to the person in front of you while still training honestly, and that's a lot harder than going a hundred percent with everybody. Same with self-handicapping. When you hold back some of your strength or speed or youth you're taking away your compensations, and now your base and posture and timing and decisions have to do the work. If I'm being brutally honest about how I think adults should train, it isn't complicated, it's just hard. Roll differently with every partner. Spend real time in bad positions on purpose and learn to get out of them. Watch your partner's face as closely as you watch their hands, and stay in the round when it gets uncomfortable instead of going on a side quest. When you hurt someone, even by accident, own it and repair it, because trust on the mat is a lot easier to lose than to get back.
That's why we don't let new people roll right away at our gym, and honestly I think it's pretty stupid when gyms do. Rolling has a social technology to it, and nobody's born knowing it, any more than kids are born knowing how to play. Before somebody new goes live they need to know what the goal is, how to apply force without it being catastrophic, how to recognize discomfort in themselves and in somebody else, and how to train with women, smaller people and older folks. Otherwise their fear just turns into uncontrolled intensity, and you get exactly what happened tonight. Technique is a big part of that. A lot of technique is the accumulated safety architecture of the game, it's what turns violence into something we can practice over and over without destroying each other. Whenever you teach a technique you should be explaining why we do it this way instead of some other way, because the answer is usually some combination of better control, fewer unnecessary risks, and fewer meaningful options for the other person.
And this goes way past the mat. Pretty much everything worth doing is a game in this sense. School is a game, and so is a job, a marriage, a friendship, even a conversation. Every one of them depends on the same things a good roll does: awareness of the other person, reciprocity, taking turns, adjusting yourself, and repairing things when you mess up. The adult who has forgotten how to play doesn’t just struggle on the mat. He struggles anywhere other people are involved, and most of the time he has no idea why people keep stepping out of the game with him.
When you boil it all down, jiu jitsu is a way of learning to use power without destroying the thing that lets you develop power in the first place, which is other people willing to play with you. The more you take care of your horizontal relationships, the people next to you on the mat, the more the vertical one between you and the art pays you back. Knowledge first, then understanding, then wisdom, and eventually maybe mastery. But only if you're still around to collect it.