Roy Marsh on the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Rocks podcast:
What you were saying before is… this is another saying I have, which drives me crazy when you hear the term, uh, movement is jiu-jitsu. No, bad movement is bad jiu-jitsu. Good movement is good jiu-jitsu. Right? Good movement. Every time you move, you expend energy, right? So you have to be a miser with your energy.
You have to be really, uh, cause I don’t want to burn energy. And he’s burning energy, but we’re burning at the same rate. So here’s the thing I tell people, like, if I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know how to get there, I don’t move.
The analogy I use is you get in your car in the morning and it’s on empty. Do you just start driving around and hoping you’ll find a gas station or do you get on your phone and go, okay, where’s the nearest gas station? How do I get there? Okay. Now I go. So. That’s what people don’t… they just think, okay, well nothing’s really happening. I got to move. Right. Um, then every movement is a chance for your opponent to escape because you’re releasing control.
Right? So you’re giving him a chance to escape on bottom. Of course I want movement to happen. Right. But on top I don’t. And so there’s two counter training methodologies because I’ve done a lot of flow rolling. When you’re training, you need to decide, are you going to flow roll? And that’s a, that’s a fantastic way to train because what does it do?
It teaches you all the positions. It teaches you to be comfortable moving in and out of all the positions, but other times you have to learn to be in the positions. Right? I’m very comfortable passing half guard. Why? I spent for a long time, never passing the half guard. I would just sit in people’s half guard.
And I learned all the things they could try to do all the ways they’re going to try to sweep me, you know, submit me so that I wouldn’t panic. Same with closed guard, got in closed guard and just stay there. Not locked down. I play the game because I tell people if you are afraid of where you are, you’ll take the first opportunity, not the best opportunity.
If you’re mounted, and you’re panicking, what are you going to do? You’re going to take the first chance to escape, which may put you in a worse position or it’d been a trap. But if you’re completely comfortable, person can submit you. You can breathe. You’ll be like, okay, okay. Now’s the time to escape. There’s my opportunity.
—
Generally, I suggest students ought to keep it moving when rolling. When two people stay in one position just fighting grips for five minutes, they’re missing out on practicing all the other positions they can be in.
On the other hand, if you don’t know what you’re doing, stop moving around so much. Part of why we discourage white belts from sparring early is they don’t know what they’re doing. Also, it’s counter productive to what we’re trying to teach the white belts. In our beginner program, we teach how to respond to the most common indicators they’d see in a street fight. But when they roll, they’re mostly seeing indicators from a jiu-jitsu game.