Last January marked three years since the death of the great Grandmaster Helio Gracie, whose legacy helped inspire our team in putting together “10 fundamentals your Jiu-Jitsu teacher needs to know”, the article that starts on page 48 of the new GRACIEMAG issue. I was plenty pleased with the piece.
I have a feeling it will cull kudos from a good number of qualified teachers. I just regret that, for lack of space, we couldn’t lengthen the list to 15, 20 or so fundamentals. The selection criteria we employed was ruthless: only 10 topics made the cut, which in a way is pretty cool, since it makes the manual all the more concise and challenging. On the other hand, some real gems ended up getting yanked.
One good example of such an anguishing snub was “Encourage your student to use the least force possible”. Could we have been imprudent in not fitting that one in there? A feeling of guilt arrests me when I reread an old statement from Helio Gracie: “Everything I know about Jiu-Jitsu a lot of other people know too. The difference is that I execute the same moves but without using force”…
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