Every few months, someone walks into the gym with a very specific technique they’ve seen on Instagram. Usually from someone with several hundred thousand followers. Usually filmed in excellent lighting.
I don’t discourage this. Curiosity about technique is good. And some of the people producing BJJ content online are genuinely excellent coaches.
But there’s a pattern worth naming.
The algorithm shows you the highlight. It doesn’t show you the ten years of unglamorous repetition behind it. It doesn’t show you the thousand reps of the basic position that makes the flashy technique possible. It definitely doesn’t show you the five times the move failed before it worked on camera.
This creates a specific kind of distortion — where students become collectors of techniques rather than builders of game. They have a wide catalogue and a shallow foundation.
The antidote isn’t to stop watching instructionals or following BJJ accounts. It’s to use them as inspiration to go deeper on fewer things, not wider on more things.
When someone brings a technique they’ve seen online to my class, my first question is always: what’s the entry to this? What’s the concept underneath it? Can you show me when you’d use it and why?
If the answer is “it looked cool and it worked on the video,” we have some foundational work to do first.
Influencers can be useful. They’re not coaches. Know the difference.
— Vince
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