BJJ Quotes: 11 more pieces of BJJ wisdom to inspire and instruct

“Discipline and consistency. I owe these two factors all have attained in my life. Things have never happened overnight. Results have appeared as a consequence of decades long toil. It is necessary to persist.”

Carlos Gracie Jr.

 “There are no shortcuts in Jiu-Jitsu, on the mats, the truth is always exposed”

Johnny Mendoza

“Even when you roll during training, you should minimize your natural talents. By limiting yourself, you may find yourself in much worse situation, but you are forced to think your way out, using techniques you would not have otherwise used. When you start doing this, you begin to understand what is really wrong in a certain situation and you begin to understand what actually needs to be done in a technical way in order to improve the situation. You then begin to develop a real, deep progress, understanding the mechanics of any situation.”

Rickson Gracie

 “I always want to be in the top position. Always. My entire game is built around sweeping my opponent and getting on top where I can use agility, positioning, and gravity to overwhelm my opponent’s defences”

Marcelo Garcia

“…something she mentions that she learned from Marcelo. I don’t think this is giving away some big secret, I’m sure others have thought of it before. But she says, one thing she learned from Marcelo is that while some people think you should train techniques on both sides this is actually limiting your training time and development.

Since you are training both sides you’re cutting down the effectiveness of one side by 50%. So if you train certain techniques to only one side, your using your training time more efficiently and increasing the potential effectiveness of the technique.

Secondly, if you train a certain moves) to one side, you can then train specific moves to the other side, moves that naturally feed into the other move based on your opponents reactions/defence/counter.”

Stephan Kesting of Grapplearts

“Athletes are not permitted certain luxuries like drinking, partying, and eating whatever they want.”

Rafa Mendes

“I can now attest that the experience of grappling with an expert is akin to falling into deep water without knowing how to swim. You will make a furious effort to stay afloat—and you will fail. Once you learn how to swim, however, it becomes difficult to see what the problem is— why can’t a drowning man just relax and tread water? The same inscrutable difference between lethal ignorance and lifesaving knowledge can be found on the mat: To train in BJJ is to continually drown—or, rather, to be drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways—and to be taught, again and again, how to swim.

Sam Harris

“Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.”

Miyamoto Musashi, Book of Five Rings

“The deepest benefits of Jiu Jitsu come off the mat. It encourages a world-view based upon the idea of rational problem solving. Jiu Jitsu is all about solving problems that are rapidly changing under stress, and that gives you an ability to identify the crux of the problem in front of you, even in a stressful situation and adapt your body and tactics to overcome that problem and to continue overcoming it as the problem itself changes. It encourages you to use a very rational trial and error method, basically the same method that science uses to overcome these problems. So it gives you this sort of problem solving mind set, which I think applies throughout life itself.”

John Danaher

“I’ ve always been a fan of the basics. After you have a good solid foundation of Jiu-Jitsu, the rest comes by instinct. You create, invent. The rest is easy. The difficult part is the beginning.”

Carlos Gracie Jr.

“When escaping, make space, take space.”

Johnny Mendoza