Budovideos boss and BJJ black belt Budo Jake, talked about how internet changed the teacher-student relantionship in BJJ in an interesting interview with defensesoap.com
I think you are probably one of the top people in the world to address the following question because of your wide involvement with all the different schools of martial arts and the fact that you’re so heavily involved in digital media. One of the things that I always found interesting with martial arts and the way they have developed through MMA is how the Internet changed the teacher-student dynamic. What do you have to say about that?
That’s an interesting topic. Before the wide availability of all kinds of media, the instructor could really piece things out very slowly and choose not to teach some things if he didn’t want to. He could keep some secrets just so he could always beat his top student. A lot of teachers worry about their students getting stronger than they are so I think there were a lot of secrets in the past.
Of course nowadays, everything’s out there on YouTube, and not just YouTube but instructional DVD’s, websites etc. There’s so much information available that the limiting factor is how much time you can devote to training and no longer can the instructor keep things secret from a student. I think it’s a fallacy that the instructor should always be stronger than a student. I think that it should be the other way around. You should be developing students that some day get better than you and therefore the art evolves and doesn’t die out.
Another element in the quick development of martial arts over the last several years is that now, in addition to there being consistent money to be made competing as a martial artist, there’s sort of a crucible now in which the various techniques can be proven. Today, what works and what don’t work is very obvious, very quickly.
Right, for sure. I read a recent interview, I think it was with Crowley Gracie, and he said it was so easy for him to make money when he moved to the United States in the ’90s because everybody was living in a fantasy land believing a lot of these other martial arts worked in combat situations when actually they didn’t. The U.S. was a little bit behind Brazil in determining the combat efficiency of martial arts.
I’m not saying that’s the only thing that martial arts should be based upon. Not everything should be relegated to combat, but if you’re teaching something and you’re telling your students that this is going to work on the street or in a full contact situation, you should be teaching techniques that are applicable.
