John Danaher has offered a thoughtful perspective on how skills are built, neglected, and recovered in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu…
And why practitioners should feel confident experimenting with new areas of their game.
In a recent Instagram post, he explained that one of the most reassuring aspects of skill acquisition is that relearning established abilities is usually far easier than developing something entirely new from scratch:
One of the great saving graces of skill acquisition is that generally one can re-learn skills faster and more easily than learning entirely new skills.
This affords us the ability to switch focus to new skills, knowing that if our established skills should diminish due to neglect as we focus on those new skills, we can quickly and easily reclaim them at a future date just by allocating attention back to them.
For grapplers who worry that exploring new guards, passing styles, or submission systems might erode their core strengths, Danaher suggests that such anxiety is largely unnecessary.
Once a skill has been deeply ingrained, it tends to leave a lasting imprint:
This allows us switch our focus around without the fear that as we focus on new skills we will somehow irretrievably lose our previous skill set.
He acknowledges that some decline is natural when a skill is not used regularly, but he stresses that this is temporary rather than permanent:
Undoubtedly those established skills may suffer a little as we stop using them as much as previously, but rest assured they’ll come back quickly once you focus on them again.
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