One of the most crucial – and yet, not often spoken of – skills that you can develop in Jiu-Jitsu is the skill of mat awareness.
It’s a skill that will serve a dual purpose, the first one being keeping you (and others) safe in training.
John Danaher reveals why:
This is the awareness of where you are positioned on a crowded mat.
It is this type of awareness that makes you a safe training partner on a crowded mat.It’s easy to get so focused on your opponents that you lose track of where you are and start crashing into other people or accidentally kicking or elbowing them.
When you have a room full of people who have food mat awareness everything runs smoothly.
When you have a room full of people with no mat awareness it’s a disaster.
Developing mat awareness could also come in handy when it comes to self defense situations:
In a real fight, you must be cognizant of your immediate surroundings and people or objects around you, because they can play a crucial role in what happens.
Avoiding tunnel vision and having a good sense of what’s going on around you is an essential self defense skill that you can practice every day on the mat by making yourself conscious of the people and movements around you as you grapple.
So how are you supposed to develop this sort of mat awareness?
Danaher explains:
Train yourself to be able to follow conversations of the people on the sideline, what positions the people next to you are in, where you can expect them to be ten seconds from now based on their current movements.
This kind of mental training will make you safer on the mat AND on the street.
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