One of my gym’s strongest competitors said something profound a while back: he said that one of his goals is to get tapped out more regularly in class. This guy is perhaps one of the toughest people I’ve ever met, and so him saying that was extremely thought provoking. The message behind his bold statement was that ultimately if you’re not putting yourself in bad spots and trying to get out of them, you’re probably not going to progress, and if you’re not putting yourself in bad enough spots that you’ll get submitted, ultimately you’re not pushing your own boundaries.

I wrote an article a while back exploring the idea of training from bad spots. To expand on that concept, not only train from bad spots, but make mistakes on purpose sometimes, and then try to figure out what you need to do to undo your own errors. By doing this, on a few occasions, I’ve actually found ways to submit people from inside of their own submissions!

One of my instructors referred to this experience as “exploring the deep waters”. Very often I’ve heard analogies of the ground being an ocean and high level black belts being sharks. The deeper the shark goes the more interesting (and dangerous) stuff they might run into, be it a squid, a giant whale etc. Similarly, the more we explore the unsafe areas of our game, the more we dare our training partners to submit us, the more familiar we become with those dangers that lurk beneath our normal plane of vision.

The less we care about whether or not we get submitted in our gyms, the more we can find our own weaknesses and expose those weaknesses to scrutiny and eventual solution. I’d much rather have one of my buddies help me figure out where I suck than an opponent in a competition. Is it fun to get submitted by your training partners? Maybe sometimes if it happens in a really goofy way and gives you a chuckle. Is it necessary and ultimately very helpful? Definitely, 100%.

Obviously, when you do this, do it with someone you trust. I’ve made the mistake of playing this game with guys who take submissions a bit too fast and paid for it the next day in soreness. Also, let people know what you are doing and why so that they too can benefit from the experience.

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There is literally no shame to tapping out in the confines of a Jiu Jitsu school, so try to find new and weird ways to get tapped out. Doing this will only improve your perspective on your own Jiu Jitsu game and expose your weaknesses. It’ll also eventually give you greater confidence in your escapes thus allowing you to plan transitions into attacks directly off of your escapes (which can wind up winning matches for you.)