How to Train as a Bigger Person
As much as it may be obvious that training is essential if you want to become better at jiu-jitsu, and as much as coaches and talking heads online will say that consistency in training is the only way to up your game, there’s one aspect of training that regularly goes overlooked: How to be a good partner. It is totally natural to be almost entirely focused on your own growth as you start on your jiu-jitsu journey, but eventually you will recognize that you work better with different training partners and that you walk away from class after rolling with certain people feeling that you got more out of that day’s session.
However, a viewer wrote to a martial arts YouTuber named Nick Albin, also known as Chewjitsu or Chewy, about a problem that a lot of smaller people wish they had. As the questioner explains, he is a larger person of around 220 lbs., and he’s constantly concerned that he might hurt some of the smaller people with whom he regularly rolls if he goes too hard. This concern has led him to be overly cautious, and he feels like it’s starting to affect his game.
As Chewy explains in the above video, there are a few ways to address the problem, and they all revolve around what he describes as the golden rule of combat sports: Treat other people like you want to be treated.
More specifically, he offers two big tips that we’ll explore below.
Catch Fast, Finish Slow
Perhaps the best piece of advice from Chewy, who is also a pretty big dude, is that you should try to use technique at full speed to put a person in the initial stages of a submission hold, but then slowly apply pressure when finishing the move. This gives the person caught in the hold ample time to devise an escape or to tap.
On the one hand, this avoids injury since you’re not going to wrench one of their joints in at a potentially awkward angle. For example, if he gets his opponent into a heel hook, and it’s tight and tucked in, he’ll stop before finishing to let his opponent know that he’s got them. That gives them an opportunity to try to get out or to tap. “I want someone to treat my body like they want to have their body treated,” he says.
On the other hand, giving them time to escape means they can get better at defending while you can study what they’re doing to better understand how to maintain control. If they do manage to escape, that teaches you about a hole in your game that you need to fix.
According to Chewy, this process of catch fast, finish slow has improved his technique and submission rate.
Use Pressure as a Means to an End
There is nothing wrong with using your strength or your size to your advantage. However, when it becomes pretty much your entire game, your technique is going to suffer. You may be able to take out smaller white belts and feel like a champ in class, but you’re going to get destroyed when you go up against someone in a tournament who can match your size and strength. You need to find ways to focus on developing technique to avoid overreliance on your physical attributes.
Chewy advises using whatever physical advantages you have as a means of achieving a technical goal. In the case of pressure, you can use it as a way to put your partner in an uncomfortable position and to open up opportunities for technique. For example, if you use your forearm to put pressure on their neck, your opponent will lift their arms to defend. When they do so, this opens up an opportunity for an armbar.
Use Common Sense
Another important point is that you can rely on common sense when you’re assessing if a person can handle the kind of pressure you may want to use. If you have 70 or 80 pounds on your training partner, don’t crash into them at full speed because there is a high enough risk of seriously hurting them. If you fall on them awkwardly, you could seriously injure them and leave them unable to train for weeks or months.
Similarly, dial it back when your partner isn’t that experienced. If you’re rolling with someone who has only been to a few classes and is new to combat sports, they’re going to lack the kind of body awareness that you develop from training. In addition to simply not being able to handle a very large person coming at them at full speed, there is a chance they may go down to the mat in an awkward manner because they have underdeveloped spatial awareness and terrible balance.
Training is about getting better and building up everyone in your class. The better they get, the more they can challenge you and force you to get better. By relying on technique rather than brawn and by being respectful, you can keep yourself healthy, keep your training partners healthy, and improve as a fighter.