Placido Santos on the Okay Podcast, talking about people approaching jiu-jitsu incorrectly:

You can’t go to the gym three, four days, four times a week to the jiu jitsu gym, go balls to the wall and expect yourself to recover. And that’s what people do. Like, that’s what the average guy does. Like, unfortunately, the average guy has absolutely zero concept of how to pace themselves in the jiu jitsu gym.

Every single roll, they go, they want to beat you. Cause you guys have to understand like with weights. Yes. There is a competitive nature in a way. It’s like, I want to outlift that.

Grant Broggi:¹

But it’s you against the bar. It’s not you against another person.

Placido:

Exactly. And so when you go against another person, like it really takes like a lot inside of a man to be like, I’m not going to beat this guy up.

I’m going to, you know, I’m just going to go soft. Right. Cause, and it takes two to tango, right? It takes two people coming onto the same page saying, Hey, We can’t afford to keep up this high intensity training load. We have to take this down. And unfortunately too many people don’t do that and they never do that.

And so their whole jujitsu career is plagued with, with, um, with injuries. Right, because they do the same thing. It’s the, uh, they repeat the cycle over and over again. They go into the gym, they go too hard, time and time again, they get injured. They take time off, they recover from the injury, they come back to the gym, they go too hard, over and over and over again, they get injured, they recover.

And then the cycle just repeats, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. So I think honestly, one of the biggest problems with most jiu jitsu practitioners, even recreational ones like Dr. G, is that they go way too hard in the gym, like in the jiu jitsu gym.

We had a brief chat about owning a gym, as I was in the process of setting up Gracie La Palma. He reminded me how the job(s) as an owner never stops, and how his coaches don’t need to worry about anything except being a good coach. I often think about conversation when someone asks me how the school’s going.