Category: BJJ Instructional Videos

Videos of BJJ techniques, competition, sparring, drills and exercises.

If you’ve missed me, check Panda Nation

Updates to Aesopian.com has been glacial slow in recent years, but that’s not to say I haven’t been busy. Since the beginning of 2016, I have written over 20 articles for the Inverted Gear blog, created over 65 (and counting) White Belt Wednesday videos with Hillary and Nelson, and I may or may not have been a crazed Adidas-wearing panda ninja that chased Nelson around his house with a katana. One of my blog posts even resulted in this t-shirt becoming a real thing:

T_JiuJitsu_model_Fundamentals_1024x1024

The purpose of this post is to catalog all that activity in one place.

White Belt Questions, Black Belt Answers:

Solo Drills: Horizontal Movements

My posts to the Inverted Gear Blog:

  1. You Learn Even on the Bad Days
  2. 5 Ways to Take Ownership of Your Progress Today –
  3. How to Fully Develop Your Grappling Gameplan
  4. Building Your Gameplan Around Combo Attacks
  5. The Best Way to Learn from Instructionals
  6. 5 Tips to Keep You on the Long Road to Black Belt and Beyond
  7. Surviving the First Year of BJJ: A Crash Course for White Belts
  8. Advice for Newbie White Belts and Anxious Blue Belts
  9. Getting Through the Blue and Purple Belt Growing Pains
  10. What It Means to be a Brown Belt and How to Make Progress Towards Black
  11. 10 Ways to Improve Your BJJ While Off the Mats
  12. 5 Simple Tips for Fixing Your Wrecked Body
  13. What Drives Success in BJJ
  14. Finding the Right BJJ School for You
  15. How to Teach for Maximum Knowledge Retention
  16. Adventures in Reaping Land: A Review of Reilly Bodycomb’s Rdojo Camp
  17. The Four Corners of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
  18. Becoming a BJJ Houdini
  19. The Black Belt Secret to Jiu-Jitsu Excuses
  20. Are you playing to win or just not lose?

More content is always in the works, so follow Inverted Gear to get it while it’s hot.

More

Seminar footage added to Mastering the Crucifix

mtc-bonus-seminars

Have you ever heard of a BJJ instructional suddenly gaining 2 hours of bonus content at no extra cost? Now you have.

We’ve added 2 hours of new seminar footage to Mastering the Crucifix. One seminar is gi, the other no-gi. Artechoke customers who already own MTC can access the bonus content here (you must be logged in):

Don’t own it yet? You can buy Mastering the Crucifix or save money by bundling it with Jeff Rockwell’s Sit-Up Escape System. Get 10% using coupon code RELAUNCH.

The digital nature of Artechoke’s cloud instructionals let’s us do cool things like this. I have a few more additions I plan to make to Mastering the Crucifix later this year.

Let’s take a minute to talk about how cool this is. We’re doing things with BJJ publishing that haven’t been done before.

Marshal is a writer who loves books, but he’s also forwarding-thinking and sees that the future of publishing isn’t made from dead trees. Some time I’ll make him talk about his work to implement a digital distribution model for college textbooks. He was working on ways reduce textbook prices and save college students from being ripped off like they are today.

3-D Jiu-Jitsu was Marshal’s proof of concept. He wanted to know if people would “get” what he’s trying to do. Explaining what makes this different than traditional BJJ instructionals has always been our biggest challenge. Is it a book, a DVD, a BJJ subscription site, a digital download?

The truth is that it’s almost all of those things, but no one exactly. It’s a hybrid. Each component is familiar, but one one else has done it quite like this. That sometimes makes it hard to explain. But when we put it into people’s hands and in front of their eyes, they always go “Wow, this is great! Why didn’t anyone else think of this?”

Today I went through all of Mastering the Crucifix and added up the run time for all its videos. If we released those on DVDs, it would be over 3:30 hours long. Most companies would have split that across 4-6 discs, call it “The Crucifix Trap System: The Black Belt’s Secret to Punishing Any Opponent with Crippling Submissions” and pushed for $175 pre-orders . The price needs to be that inflated so they can pay the 50% affiliate fee to guys who hype it on social media and e-mail lists.

If we published it as a paper book, it would be as big as anything Victory Belt put on book shelves, back when they were into martial arts instead of CrossFit.

If it was in the app store, we’d have to split it into six separate $30 apps to get around the file size limits, like BudoVideos does with their DVDs.

The point I’m making is the Mastering the Crucifix is a big product by any traditional standard, and we went to the trouble of combining all of them in a new way, even adding multi-angle looped demonstrations not seen anywhere else.

Now we’re almost doubling the size of an instructional at no extra cost, basically because I thought “Hey, this would be cool to share.”

I hope you think it’s cool too. Tell a friend if you do.

Remember, Artechoke members have access to the private Artechoke Open Mat group Facebook to ask questions and get answers from authors like me. Find the link in the sidebar after logging in.

More

Crucifix Double Feature with Inverted Gear

Lately I’ve been lucky enough to train with Nelson and Hillary, the black belt couple behind Inverted Gear. We got together and shot technique videos for the Inverted Gear YouTube channel, including two on my favorite position, the crucifix.

As a gift to fans of Aesopian.com, Nelson and Hillary hooked me up with coupon code AESO for 15% off coupon code for InvertedGear.com. I’ve been a fan of their gis since back when they first started (here’s my video review from a few years ago) because they make tall/slim models in my size so I am very happy recommending you pick up one for yourself.

Here are the crucifix videos:

Crucifix from Side Control to Wristlock

Breakdown of Baret Yoshida’s Crucifix at Polaris Pro

More

Invisible Jiu-Jitsu with Jack Taufer

My friend Jack Taufer is a now not-so-secret source of the fabled “invisible” jiu-jitsu that Rickson Gracie and his lineage of black belts are renown for. You should remember Jack from my recent video about finding simpler solutions to problems. Budo Jake had Jack in the Budovideos studios to film five instructional videos to help promote BJJ vs Cancer, Jack’s effort to raise funds for his sister and her family as she fights stage 4 breast cancer. You can contribute to the fundraising at gofundme.com/bjjvscancer. He is just over halfway toward the goal. I am sharing all five of Jack’s recent technique videos below.

 
BJJ vs Cancer with Jack Taufer (All 5 videos in a Youtube playlist).

More

Finding Simple Solutions Thanks to Jack Taufer

In this video, we go over two ways to deal with the annoying “1/4 guard,” or whatever you call it when you’re almost in mount but your foot is still stuck. The first method is the rolling back take or twister roll, as made popular by the likes of Eddie Bravo and Ryan Hall. The second technique is a decidedly simpler solution.

The friend I talk about in the second half is Jack Taufer, a black belt under Dave Kama in the Rickson Gracie lineage. You may have seen Jack on Budovideos.com’s TWIBJJ series or his video threads on the UG (links below).

Jack is raising funds to support his nephew’s mother as she fights cancer. Please consider sending a PayPal donation to jacktaufer@hotmail.com.

You can learn more about Jack on the Kama Jiu-Jitsu website. He is available for private lessons at Rickson Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Laguna Niguel and seminars anywhere you want to fly him. Georgette Oden wrote a glowing review of one such seminar.

Thanks to Jeremy for teaching the first half of this video. Jeremy is the owner and head instructor at Zombie BJJ in Allentown, PA, where I train and teach too.

If there’s interest, I can talk in more depth about the topics of simplicity vs complexity, depth vs breadth, individual style vs school/lineage style, refinement vs experimentation, body mechanics, postural alignment, etc. Jack is on a kick of filming requests too, so I’ll see if I can get him to share his thoughts too. Let me know with your comments or by sharing on Facebook!

In the meantine, watch more technique videos by Jack Taufer:

Rear naked choke details with Black Belt Jack Taufer

This Week in BJJ Episode 39 invisible Jiu Jitsu with Jack Taufer

This Week In BJJ Episode 62

Technical Mount Escape Demonstration by Jack Taufer

Flattening From the Back by Jack Taufer

More

Berimbolo Knockdown [Video]

The first and most critical movement of the bermimbolo — knocking them to their butt — caused me problems for a long time. In this video, I talk about how I used to try (and fail) to do the berimbolo, how the berimbolo is different than seemingly similar older De la Riva sweeps, and how to do it right now. Watch on “Berimbolo Knockdown” YouTube.

Thanks to my sponsors Scramble, Gawakoto, Grapplearts and Grapplers Guide! (If you join GrapplersGuide, use code “Aesopian” to save $30!)

If you enjoy my teaching style and want to support me, buy a copy of my highly-praised crucifix instructional through Artechoke Media.

More

Mastering the Crucifix is Live! Did You Get It Yet?

Mastering the CrucifixMy big crucifix and reverse omoplata instructional is now out at ArtechokeMedia.com! Buy your copy for $39.95 or read an entire chapter for free first.

So what do we call this–book, e-book, video, website, or what? It has written explanations, multi-angle animated GIFs, and video instruction. You can access it as a responsive app-like website on any modern device with a web browser. You can download it in ePub format for your e-reader. You can ask questions on any page to get feedback directly from the author. It’s the Swiss Army knife of BJJ instructionals.

If you backed us on Indiegogo, you should have received an email with your login credentials. Let me know if you didn’t or you had problems. You can log in anywhere on ArtechokeMedia.com or within Mastering the Crucifix itself.

Now that I’m no longer spending all my time working on getting this out, I’ll get back to updating my site and podcast. Expect behind-the-scenes looks at what it took to get ArtechokeMedia.com up and running (I did all the web development) and previews of upcoming projects.

Buy Mastering the Crucifix now.

More

Functional Half Guard (Reuploaded)

Functional Half Guard is back up on YouTube. Despite being filmed by two Estonian white belts back in 2006, it’s still one of the best instructionals on half guard fundamentals. The description on YouTube contains the table of contents with clickable minute markers. Enjoy!

Want more free full length BJJ instructionals? Check out 3-D Jiu-Jitsu: An Introduction to Thinking Conceptually. Like that new multimedia e-book format? Pre-order my crucifix instructional.

More