I recently put up a blog post detailing an excellent seminar I took with John Will, on the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Front Headlock. John is a fifth degree black belt, Australian Jiu Jitsu pioneer, and extraordinarily skilled coach.
John commented on my blog post, on Facebook, referring to me as a “grandmaster at note-taking”.
High praise indeed, though many of my peers have expressed appreciation of my blogging about the various martial arts seminars I have attended, for well over a decade.
Note taking is a skill I feel has served me well, as an aid to my retention of Jiu Jitsu techniques and other knowledge.I hope my fellow seminar attendees have also benefited.
I do this in hope it will help others, but if I am honest, I do it mainly for myself. Enlightened self-interest, if you will.
An IT Background
I have always been pretty good at taking notes. I worked in IT for around forty years. Too many IT people avoid documentation, either due to a morbid dread of a task they see as peripheral and pedestrian, or because they wish to keep their secrets, as a potential aid to job security.
I was always an avid documenter, and wrote volumes regarding programs, technical procedures, job streams and pipelines, etc.
It made life so much easier for me and everyone else. I didn’t have to deal with constant phone calls from people asking, “How do I …”. I could just shoot them a detailed document via email, or point them to an in-house wiki.
It worked even better when the person asking the question was my future self!.
In IT, documentation often seems to be becoming a lost art, which I believe to be a huge, mostly unrecognised, problem.
Opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
Jordan Peterson
IT and Jiu Jitsu are both highly procedural. You do A first, then B, then C, then D.You may have seen the flowcharts in Eddie Bravo’s Mastering the Rubber Guard and Mastering the Twister books.
Ther was the recent huge flowchart someone published on Facebook, which attempted to break down Gordon Ryan’s passing system, as recently released on video.
Jiu Jitsu is full of logic like:
- First do A, then B, then C
- Do D, if E happens do F, If G happens do H, otherwise do I
Stepwise logic in the first instance, and if/then, or switch, statements in the second. I guess there are for and while loops, though too much repetition makes you predictable in Jiu Jitsu.
We could maybe stretch the analogy as far as subroutines and functions. Actually … yes.
Generally, in Jiu Jitsu, you have to things in a stepwise process, and in a particular order, to make them work properly. For a basic under-the-leg guard pass:
- Get posture, L hand on his R hip, R hand on his chest so the can’t pull you down or sit up
- Pin his R hip to the floor with your L hand
- Move your R knee out out to the side for base
- Move your L knee into the base of his spine
- Sit back to open the legs
- If his legs are still closed, stand up on the R foot, well back, put your R hand on his R knee, and drop your weight on it to open the legs
- Underhook his L leg with your R arm and lift it onto your shoulder
- Drive forward on your toes, pushing his knee to his nose, stretching his L hamstring and stressing his structure
- Move anticlockwise and allow the tension in his hamstring and structure slingshot the leg past your face
- Consolidate side control (a subroutine in itself!)
Generally you need to perform the steps in this order for the pass to work. Do them in a different order, or leave one out, the pass may not work, or worse – we get triangled or armbarred.
(On the other hand – sometimes, not always – doing the steps outside the usual and predictable order can surprise the opponent, or even improve the efficacy of the technique. John has talked about this in a few of his seminars. Generally though, you probably should understand the rules before experimenting with breaking them.)
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Attributed to Pablo Picasso, among others
I find writing out the steps of a new move I learned in class, assists me immensely in understanding how the move should be done.
Don’t just listen to what the instructor says – WATCH what they do as well. Sometimes a black belt will have so internalised some important details of a favourite technique, that he or she does them unconsciously, and will forget to mention them in the class or seminar. I know I have done this myself.
Some questions are always worth considering when analysing a technique:
- What is my right hand doing?
- What is my left hand doing?
- What is my right foot doing?
- What is my left foot doing?
- What role does head position play?
- Where should my weight be?
- What angle should I be to the opponent at the start of the technique?
- What angle should I be to the opponent at the finish of the technique?
- What is the most crucial point to be understood and implemented to make the technique work?
- In what direction should I move the opponent?
- In what direction should I move myself?
- etc.
Ask the instructor questions yourself. Prepare some in advance, even.
To take notes at the seminar, I like a reporter’s notebook, one that is small, easily flipped open, and will lie flat. I always take a couple of pens with me in case one runs out. My eyesight has degraded from age to the point where I can hardly read what I am scribbling down without glasses (and glasses make Jiu Jitsu difficult), but my flat out scrawl is legible enough to be deciphered later.
I try to note all the salient points and write them down. Each step of the technique, but also particular important concepts or principles which make the technique work.
You don’t need, and probably can’t record, every detail – I’ve often found that just a few well chosen words or phrases may act as a mnemonic that I can use to tease out several paragraphs of details, in the later phases of producing a blog entry.
Scribble it down now, review and rewrite it later
Science has it that you retain eighty per cent of what you learn, if you review your notes within the first twenty four hours of the event.
It isn’t so much the recording, as the later revising and organisation of the material, that seems to carry the real benefit. I once attended a two and a half hour seminar with a coral belt, scribbling away like mad. And then promptly left the gym, leaving my notebook behind. NOOOO!
I still managed to generate a long and detailed blog post the next day, purely from memory.
Use abbreviations and mnemonics to get those main points scribbled down.
- H2H – head to head
- L, R – left, right
- O – opponent
- SC – side control
- KoB – knee on belly
- DLR – de la Riva Guard
- etc.
Arguably, you will better remember the abbreviations you devise yourself.
Photos and video
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe a few less in Jiu Jitsu where context is so important. I’ll definitely take a picture with my phone, if I’m wrestling with how to describe a particular position in the moment. I usually take a few just to add some colour to the notes.
Video is a proven teaching tool for Jiu Jitsu. It certainly helps to have a full replay of the instruction that you can look at over and over.
However, I find that I am significantly less engaged with the instructor, if I am viewing him/her through my phone or a camera.
An early adopter of BJJ told me that in the early days John Will refused his request to record the session on video, saying, “No, [the guy]. Use your brain!”
John has mellowed in his attitude to video now, but I understand why he said that.
I wonder if people that spend all their time recording everything they see on holiday or elsewhere really manage to immerse themselves in the environment and the activity, and fully enjoy the moment.
My ideal would be to have someone else (presumably someone without my reservations about video) record the techniques, while I take in, and jot down, the unfiltered experience.
I always ask permission regarding photos, and avoid video, unless the instructor approves it without me asking. I have enough ethical quibbles about my notes and their audience, with regard to other people’s intellectual property, without bringing video into it.
But, if anyone ever stopped me scribbling notes, I’d wonder if I belonged there. No one has – so far.
When revising my notes with view to publication, I will scour YouTube for freely available clips which serve to illustrate a particular subject in a way that meshes well with the seminar presenter’s own instruction. Ideally, I will find clips featuring the presenter, going through some of the very material they covered in the course. I will include these clips in my blog post.
Further Possibilities
To a considerable extent the constraints of blogging software – I started with Blogger, have since upgraded to WordPress – dictate how to format the finished notes.
For personal notes, especially on paper, you are far less constrained by formats. There are a variety of note taking formats and methods to explore.
For my personal digital notes I use Evernote, which is platform independent and allows multiple notebooks and tags. John Will uses Noteshelf, if I remember correctly – which only works on Apple products. There are many free or cheap note taking apps out there, we are spoiled for choice.