by Prof. Renato Migliaccio
We believe that competitions are just a small part in the martial arts we still encourage everyone to experience it. Experience the preparation for it the 12 weeks prior, the diet (in case of adults), It is a for sure thing: YOU GET BETTER!
We recognize that competitions aren’t for everyone, however, we think that if you can fit competition into your schedule, you should enter one of the numerous tournaments constantly running.
In house tournaments is a great to start competing at every skill level, from new to greatly experienced. The tournaments will help kids learn how they would react or how they would function in a situation of a stress.
Actually competing brings countless benefits. Competitions act like a stress test that helps you know, which parts of your sport are strong and what are weaker. You may possibly have a really solid half guard, however, learn that you have to work how to pull or reach half guard from any position during stress.
There are holes in everybody’s game, that can be more identified when competing and maybe later fixed. Competitions open you to a larger array of Jiu Jitsu styles/games that you might not have seen in your BJJ training classes.
Competition can help kids and adults in learning how to react, how their physiology works, and how their mind works under stress. The more we do competitions and tournaments the more we will be able to function better under pressure and under some sort of stress.
Winning or losing is the part of the tournament that students need to understand. The competitions can make students not scared of losing but scared of not fighting. It’s very important if you became a black belt, but haven’t competed then there is something missing in your training.
You need to compete and expose yourself, put yourself in stress, learn your psychology, learn how you might react to the stress, and you need to know that otherwise, you will be an incomplete black belt. This tournament can give your kids the strength to move past every training level, and accelerate their rate of learning.
For the parents, we would say it’s easier to make your child get started into in-housetournaments. You will see some will do better and some will not. But the more your children do it, the better they will become.
We cannot go back and change our past and the way we started things, but we can always make a new way future. So starting competitions now are important for you to be able to get better and evolve in Jiu-Jitsu.
