Stealing John Danaher's Instagram Posts

Your strength is in your stance:  It’s good to be strong. Strength helps almost every aspect of combat sports.  Understand however, that your greatest source of strength in a match is not from your muscles but from your stance.  Show me the strongest man in the room and make him perform in a poor stance and I’ll show you a man who gets manhandled by smaller, weaker opponents who hold a strong stance. In addition that strong man will quickly get exhausted as he compensates for failures in stance with muscular strength. If you want to increase your mat strength, your first step is to improve your stance. Understand that for all the major positions of Jiu jitsu there is an appropriate stance. If you’re just beginning Jiu jitsu and you have no clue what constitutes a good stance in a given position I suggest you watch footage of great champions in competition or even in training and watch not for the flashy elements, or who wins and who loses, as most people do, but rather, ...

If you can clearly articulate the problem - it’s usually easy to find a solution:  The only truly unsolvable problems in jiu jitsu are those where you don’t identify it as a problem - and as a result you never even begin looking for a solution. Just as bad is a situation where you fail to identify the problem accurately and look for solutions to the wrong problem, or a pseudo problem or a part of a problem.  Always have a very clear understanding of two essential questions WHAT EXACTLY AM I TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH? And WHAT ARE THE MAIN OBSTACLES THAT MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO ACCOMPLISH THESE GOALS? If you keep a healthy focus on these two questions, you will find it much easier to create effective solutions to the obstacles that hold you back.  THE FIRST STEP TO FINDING A SOLUTION IS ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION.  Know what you want to do and know what stands in your way and you’ll have a better chance getting the question right from the start.

  Lever and fulcrum: Strength plays a big role in the outcome of matches.  Thankfully, however, there is hope for the weak - it’s not how strong you are per se, but how much strength you can APPLY in a specific scenario that counts. Y our APPLIED strength potential is very different from your raw strength.  There are many factors such as position, fatigue level, balance and stance that can make a weak man feel strong and a strong man feel weak - but chief among them is LEVER AND FULCRUM. Just as a weak man can use a long lever to lift a heavy rock that a strong man cannot lift with his arms, so too, a weaker grappler can use his body to create lever and fulcrum to overwhelm a stronger grappler. Again, your raw strength is not nearly as important as your ability to apply the strength that you have - and if you apply it at the end of the lever over a well-placed fulcrum - you will be plenty strong enough to get the job done against even your strongest foes. The weaker you ...

When you’re climbing a rope or ladder - it’s always one step at a time:  The general nature of control in Jiu jitsu is to begin contact at the extremities - the hands and feet - and work progressively up to the hips/waist and ultimately the head.  Any attempt to skip steps along the way always comes at the price of sacrificing control.  Don’t get me wrong - sometimes you have to skip steps and lunge for the next grip when circumstances demand, sometimes you can get away with it, but the best general pattern is the same as when climbing a rope, a ladder or a cliff - if you let go and try to jump to the next grip, bad things tend to happen.  In most situations it’s better to take your time and focus on control.  Progressively work from joint to joint, grip to grip until you secure the two focal points of Jiu jitsu - the hips/waist and head (and of course - this is Jiu jitsu so you must avoid your opponents guard/legs as you do this).  Combat sports always loo...

The remarkable power of underhooks in ground grappling:  It’s never enough to just pin someone with body weight in Jiu jitsu.  To exert meaningful control you need to go further and anchor yourself to your opponents body in ways that - shut down his ability to escape - set up submission holds - facilitate moving to another pin Probably the single best thing you can do to achieve these things is to underhook your opponents arm.  This immediately anchors you to your opponent in ways that make escape difficult and control easy.  This should be one of the first things you look to attain once you get to half guard top or any pin except north/south.  Don’t settle for just pinning - get your underhook as soon as possible and you’ll double your effectiveness from top position.

  Making your mounted position intimidating (even when you can’t punch):  The original purpose of Jiu jitsu was to build a positional game where you attain what was considered the ultimate positions in a one on one fight without weapons - the mount and rear mount - from where you could rain down uncontested punches and elbows on an opponent to finish with either the strikes themselves, or submissions based on defensive reactions to those strikes. Now you have to ask yourself - are those positions still any good when you aren’t allowed to strike in grappling matches?  Well, obviously rear mount is still a great position since strangleholds from the rear are the highest rated finishing method in Jiu jitsu. What about the front mount? Is that still the best position when you are grappling?  At first look I would say no. The mounted position by itself is nothing special in a grappling match. It is actually less stable than most side or north south pins and offers fewer s...