I’m going to make a bold assumption: You want to get better at BJJ. (I must be a mind reader.) Open mat can be a secret weapon in your training if you use it right. These tips will help make sure you do.
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I’ve been posting to Facebook and Twitter lately when I have stuff that’s not worth a whole blog post but it’s still worth sharing. You can follow me here:
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It’s like they took a stupid white belt move and turned it into a legitimate black belt technique.
Here are the results of the BJJ gi survey. A second survey will be coming out soon that fixes some problems with the first. For example, you couldn’t match durability or sizing problems to a specific gi (since they were all lumped together).
The data collected could be sliced and analyzed in more ways than I’m showing below, so I’m offering it in CSV for anyone who wants to crunch the numbers. Here’s an example: The top three favorite brands were Atama, Gameness and Koral. But that’s not a big surprise when they are the three brands most people own and most people only have 1-3 gis. What would be interesting to see is of the people who own these brands and others, are they still their favorite?
I’ve been wondering what people like and dislike about BJJ gis, so I put together a survey. If you include your email address, you’ll have a chance to win and have me record personalized instructional video on whatever you want. (Direct link to the survey.)

Stephan Kesting of Grapple Arts just launched an awesome new BJJ resource, Beginning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (beginningbjj.com).
Signing up for the e-course gets you a free e-book, A Roadmap for Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. After reading it, my first thought was “I wish I’d had this when I started.” It’s a superb starting reference, presenting the right lessons and concepts for a beginner. The e-mails that come with the e-course are the same great quality all of Stephan’s work is.
If you run a gym, this would be a perfect to give to new students. I’m thinking…