White Belt - How To Survive Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: Part 6, Tap early to come back & fight again

White Belt - How To Survive Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: Part 6, Tap early to come back & fight again

This is really important advice: tap early, especially when you begin training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Let me give you a very roundabout, circuitous explanation of why you should tap earlier than you think you need to.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I have done a lot of martial arts which involved being struck by your opponent. Over time, the more you get kicked and punched, the more accustomed you get. When the odd flying leg or elbow hits me while rolling in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu my reaction is more annoyance when my training partner wants to stop and apologise – I usually say “It’s nothing, let’s crack on!”.

So here’s the thing, being a grizzly old broken-down warhorse I am used to bumps and scrapes. I’m not for a single minute claiming to be particularly ‘hard’ and tough, I know from experience that there are people out there who are genuinely as tough as teak versus myself, but I have at least had a fair amount of experience at taking physical knocks. I am conditioned to physical violence and taking damage, again to a degree. And despite that, I tap at the earliest possible stage in training. I don’t want to rob my training partners of reality and the true full correct application of their techniques, BUT I also don’t intend to lightly miss 6 to 8 weeks of training waiting for an injury to heal when it could have been avoided by me simply tapping a second earlier.

Especially when you are first starting when you have no idea what people are doing to you, you really must tap early and often. Don’t be too competitive and have too much pride before you have any ability! You can always choose to never tap and take the consequences when you make it to the world championships, or even the local competition you enter. BUT why get injured for nothing in training? Just tap!

I have a training partner who is more than half my age (I could nearly be his grandfather in fact). He is much more skilful than me, despite starting at a similar time. He is faster and better than me, and he learns technique ten times quicker than I do. He beats me every time we roll, normally with an arm bar, even though I know it’s coming, and I’m ok with losing, it’s all part of the process.

And while this young technical wizard is very good at executing submissions, he is not anywhere near so smooth at realising when my middle-aged calcium depleted joints have reached their natural limits. In other words, he applies joint lock submissions too quickly for me to have the chance to safely tap without being injured. So in his case, as soon as he isolates my arm I tap.

Which is frustrating for him because he can’t complete the move, but I’d rather his (fictional) ADCC preparations were cut short than my arm finished the session pointing the wrong way!

In one case he managed to get an armbar from a weird position on me and push it too far before I could react, leading to a sound which was a combination of a tear and a snap coming from my elbow joint, and a month or two of thankfully minor injury for me.

So far, I have only been choked unconscious once, which was quite an interesting experience as well as being entirely my own stupid fault! We were practising the aforementioned bow and arrow choke. I was training with a girl, which I always find a bit awkward to be honest. So anyway, I put the choke on her badly & she tapped. I then relaxed not showing her enough respect for her skills, and frankly probably demonstrating innate middle aged deep-seated sexism, and very casually let her put the choke on me. Then when I felt it was tight enough, I decided to not tap just yet to make sure she had applied it properly. An indeterminate amount of time later I came back to consciousness to find myself doing a weird shaking thing like a fish out of water, and my vision went from being dark to being narrow to returning fully. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience to be honest, but it was totally unnecessary, if I had been less patronising I could have saved myself from seeing stars.

Just.

Tap.

Do it early and often and come back to fight again.

That was "White Belt - How To Survive Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: Part 6, Tap early to come back & fight again"

Written by Jimmy Rose, lifelong martial artist & BJJ Enthusiast