Last night during training Professor Rob Handley pretty much blew my mind when he started talking about the best defense for positions like top side control and defending the mount position. Professor Handley told us he knew black belts that never trained mount defenses. At first my reaction was did they buy their black belt on eBay? How do they not know mount defenses!? Then Professor Handley proceeded to explain that these individuals didn’t practice mount defense because they never got mounted.
Their defense was in fact so good that they never needed to use mount defense so why waste time training it?
This opened a whole different aspect of jiujitsu for me. This is not to say I’m going to stop training mount defenses and escapes but it made me realize that at high levels of jiujitsu there is so much beneath the surface that the average person doesn’t see. It also reinforced the fact that I have a LONG ways to go as far as my own game goes.
Having the mindset that I will never need a mount escape because I will never get mounted is a very novel concept for me. On the surface this attitude may seem lazy, but if you think about it this is not the case. To be so good that you never get mounted means a number of things. For one you will probably need to have an insanely good guard. You can’t be mounted if they can’t pass your guard. In addition you should probably have a nasty top game as well. Again, if you can’t get reversed or swept, you can’t get mounted. I’m sure there are a number of other aspects to one’s game that should be polished and perfected in order to reach a point where you don’t “need” mount escapes but the take home point here is that Jiujitsu is just as much mental as it is physical if not more so. Your mental state can make a huge difference in how you roll and train and can open or close doors to your progression on the mats.
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