When you look at all the available instructional videos on jiu-jitsu, there’s enough to last a lifetime of training. And many free videos on YouTube and Instagram are better than those on sale on the marketplaces like BJJ Fanatics and Budo Videos.

Then, there are channels like Gracie Breakdown and Ayrshire Grappler that are arguably as useful, if not more, than the instructionals.

But maybe even better still, are videos of actual competition, which you may find on YouTube, or perhaps FloGrappling.

Samo Burja wrote about YouTube as a vehicle for transferring tacit knowledge. He brings up the story of a javelin thrower named Julius Yego, who taught himself the sport by watching YouTube and went on to compete in the Olympics. (And jiu-jitsu enthusiasts know the story of Chan Sung Jung catching Leonard Garcia in a twister in a UFC fight, then saying he learned the move from YouTube.)

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook.

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Some will object that tacit knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of a skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled autodidacts. It’s true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge by directly interacting with the object of mastery and figuring out things on their own, but this is very difficult. True autodidacts who can invent their own techniques are rare, but many can learn by watching and imitating.

And from Cedric Chin’s series on tacit knowledge, here he writes about how to use YouTube to learn:

So the solution here is to do what Oon figured out all those years ago: don’t wait for someone to come along and explain what’s going on. Don’t rely on instructionals alone. Look at actual experts doing the actual thing. In the context of Judo, this means developing the meta-skill of watching competition video yourself, in order to break a competitor’s technique down into its constituent parts. You try to figure out why it’s so effective; later, in the dojo, you attempt to replicate it by copying.

In fact, as we’ll soon see: this principle is generalisable. When you want to learn a skill on YouTube, you should spend a little bit of time watching instructionals, but then spend the rest of it watching experts doing the actual thing. The former is by definition explicit; the latter allows you to capture what is tacit.

Maybe this can also inform the way we approach live instruction. If you’re enrolled in a school run by a champion but his or her teaching is lacking,¹ you can still learn a lot simply by watching them roll. Of course, the better option is to find a school where the teacher is actually great at teaching, since you can always use video learning to watch the champions.