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Garry Tonon Shares Some Advice He Wishes He Received As a Blue Belt

Garry Tonon Shares Some Advice He Wishes He Received As a Blue Belt

 

Garry Tonon is known as someone who grapples with a lot of heart – he’s been known to take up much bigger opponents.

He talked about some of his experiences with Dirty White Belt podcast. Garry Revealed a lot of interesting tidbits.

On personal goals:

A lot more geared toward professional competitions. IBJJF, as far as nogi is concerned, has very limited numbers of professional competitions that they hold. And the ones which they do you ironically have to qualify to be involved in them by competing in the gi – which doesn’t really make any sense.

Garry later added:

One of the goals is to win ADCC.

On nerves prior to competing:

Of course, It’s funny. I used to, when people would come to me as like new competitors in my school or other places and ask me about mentality leading up to a competition and things . I used to give them a very structured answer and explain how I prepare and things an what they need to be thinking about etc. But the truth of the matter is when you first go out to do competition there’s just no avoiding it you’re going to be wanting to kinda p*ss your pants essentially. It’s just a completely different feeling from training in the gym. Competing against somebody who also has the intent to win and would do so at pretty much any cost is very different than training in the gym and always will be. There’s nothing that gets you used to it except doing it over and over again.

On advice he’d give his blue belt self:

 Just Quit! Quit While you’re ahead (laughs). Actually I’m starting, I don’t know if I should say this so I’ll keep it to myself. Ok, blue belt Garry… Basically I would tell him that he knows nothing and he’s not gonna know anything for a very long time and even when he thinks he starts to know something definitely doesn’t. I think the biggest thing and I think I did a decent job of it but moving forward and just an open mind. Only other thing I think that I would’ve expressed to myself is that I maybe should’ve spent a little more time watching some of the best in the sport do what they do. So watch a little bit more high level grappling, high level mma earlier on in my career because I was always very creative; I obviously took instructions from my instructors who are obviously very high level … but to be able to pull that kind of information from people just watching them do their best at the chosen field that I chose is extremely beneficial. And to miss out on that it certainly slowed down the progress that I could’ve made.

Skip to the 18 minute mark to listen to the entire 20 minute Garry Tonon interview below.