Oh my god! What! What! What!

Click through for video!

VIDEO: 4 Submissions from Modified Scarfhold.

Believe it or not I know more than just butt scooting and guard pulling. And I shot video to prove it. See the tutorial after the jump.

Stephan Kesting emailed me last week to let me know about a freeBJJ/grappling DVD he is releasing and I wanted to pass the word along to everyone. You can watch a preview here or sign up to get the DVD here. I own all of Stephan’s DVDs and have been a big fan of him and his sites (Grappleart.com and the newer BeginningBJJ.com) for years. It’s awesome that he is putting out this DVD since his original instructionals remain some of my favorites.

For those of you wondering, my knee is healing up…

1. How to get good isn’t a big secret. Get on the mats, get good instruction and do conditioning, drilling or sparring. Gameplans, flow charts, notebooks, journals and instructionals are gravy. Training is the meat and potatoes.

2. Spar with everyone you can. Force yourself to go with guys who intimidate you. Experience is what counts, not mental tallies of who tapped who. And always finish the round, no matter how tired you are.

3. Escaping submissions and bad positions isn’t easy. And it’s not supposed to be. That’s kinda the point…

Rickson once said he admires Nino Schembri for “how he looks at positions in new ways”. (He also might not have said that. The quote is probably inaccurate since I read it years ago and can’t find the source any more.)

That idea stuck with me. As a beginner at the time it struck me, “How many ways can you think about a position? When is mount not just mount? When is guard not guard?” Those questions have become a kind of mind-clearing Zen koan. It opened me up to thinking…

Check out the discussion of Three Rules for Good Jiu-Jitsu. This post stems from that discussion and others elsewhere on the internet.

The two main arguments are that “train smart” and “have fun” are more important than “train hard”. And there is truth to that, but it also depends on how you look at it.

If you don’t enjoy training, you’re not likely going to stick to it, but you have to be careful about how you define “fun” and how much priority you give “fun” things. When I see people who are…