Redcat Academy

‘Character’ - a word you can find on many a martial arts school pamphlet; right alongside ‘integrity’, ‘honour’, ‘discipline’ …. Yep!

I honour the people who taught me what I know. I pay tribute to them at every opportunity. Without their care, guidance and time - I would be bereft of 90% of the things I know about the art I love.

I have been privileged to have been guided and taught by many, many wonderful people. Here’s an oldie (but a goodie) of a younger me, with professor Helio Gracie and my beloved BJJ coach - Rigan Machado.

Complexity in BJJ …
I have often said, ‘the simplicity of Jiu Jitsu got me there - but the complexity of Jiu Jitsu is what has kept me there’.

Consider this; the simple game of ‘naughts and crosses’ (tic - tac - toe) has over 250,000 ways it can unfold! Chess, apparently, has more ways it can possibly unfold, than there are atoms in the known universe!
Well, Jiu Jitsu, is potentially even more complicated than that!!

There are many, many hundreds of techniques, with more being developed every single day! Essentially, we are trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle, a huge jigsaw puzzle that might cover the entire floor of the house we live in. But there’s another problem - this is not a ’static’ puzzle! Whilst we are doing our best to solve it - there are more pieces being thrown in, at a faster rate than we can fit together the few small pieces that have currently captured our attention! The puzzle is growing at an exponential rate!

Know this, regardless of your rank, level of expertise or experience on the mat - the Jiu Jitsu that you are building, is YOUR Jiu Jitsu. It is uniquely yours; and potentially, you also might add your own pieces to the ever-expanding puzzle that we are all trying to understand!

FRIENDS - here are a few Fundamental things I have taken from the mat - into other aspects of my own life. They are hard-won ideas - I sincerely hope that you may you find one or two that help you. Often, it’s about ‘timing’ - hearing, seeing or reading the ‘right thing’ just at the ‘right time’ - can nudge us toward a little course-correction that brings about an improvement in the way we do life.
Redcat Field Notes

As children, we effortlessly learned our native language. Whilst we were doing that, we also formed a set of emotional responses - we learned how to respond to certain things - we did it all without realising it.
But now, as adults, if we have to learn a new language - how much effort might that task require? Lots. And with regard to our emotional responses to things and situations - imagine how much effort might be required to modify those - should we need to do so? A challenging task.
Unlearning, as it were, seems to be a very very challenging task. I have had some quite competent martial artists come to spend time to train with me over the decades - and I can assure you that they are much more difficult to teach than those who are completely untrained. Unlearning things - can be very challenging.

The Belt won’t do the training for us ….
The belt we wear around our waist won’t do the work for us. The certificate on the wall won’t do the study for us. The accolades that others might send our way, won’t imbue us with any more skill than we already have. It’s the work my friends. It’s the work, the effort, the sacrifice, the day-to-day grind that provides results.
The belt is just the odometer … but we have to do the driving ourselves. If we hang with the ‘ordinary’, we do the ‘ordinary’, and the only outcomes we can reasonably expect, are ‘ordinary’ ones.

Woke up - coffee - make an observation about the world - typical start to the day … and so … pen in hand:
We can build a serene soul and a way of looking at the world through rigour and difficulty. The challenge of dealing with things that are not easy, is precisely what allows us to build a robust and anti-fragile mind and body. And the difficulties are never confined to the mat, we all know this, life can be very challenging - the other thing though, that is not confined to the mat, are the usefulness and benefits of those aspects of ourselves that we shape there. We bring what we learn under challenging circumstances, into all other aspects of our lives.
The Redcat Way.

Solving impossible problems.
As children we don’t have the resources to solve complex problems - we try on various behaviours - and when we find one that works, we embody it.
Martial arts, for me, offered order where there had been chaos - competence where there had been vulnerability and agency where there had been helplessness.
And in trying my hand, in many styles of martial arts in a number of different countries, I eventually came to Jiu Jitsu. It offered a level of both simplicity and effectiveness that I had only dreamed of - and yet, as time went by, it also provided the level of complexity and nuance that captured and held my boundless curiosity.
But then, what took a lot of time - was something that depended on me alone. I had to design and develop a culture that allowed allows to reap all the same benefits I had, without having to go through the drama.
The Redcat Way.

I love teaching. I hate hotels. I hate their pillows. I hate standing in queues. But I love teaching. I hate eating out. I hate sitting on aeroplanes. I hate going through security. But I love teaching. I hate not being in my own home. I hate having to sit up straight at a restaurant. I hate small talk. But I love teaching.
So … there you have it.
I love teaching - I love people interacting with genuinely curious and fully engaged people on the mat. I love forever inching my way toward the perfect class. I love optimising, analysing, refining and iterating on techniques and concepts and sharing that with others.
But I hate the travelling that goes often with it.
2800+ seminars since I was presented with my own black belt - and ‘hand to heart’ I can assure you - I still love teaching. See less