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…

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?