Ivan
purple belt
I started jiu-jitsu four years ago. Before that, I trained in parkour. I actually trained with one of the original founders, Sébastien Foucan. He was in the movie Casino Royale. I remember watching the movie and thinking I needed to do something active. I’ve never been a “go to the gym” or “go for a run” type of person. I find it too boring. I need a game. I need something that gets my mind active. I like puzzle-solving. I’d done a little bit of Wing Chun kung fu before. But with a lot of the traditional martial arts, there’s no game involved, because you’re not sparring. It’s all very theoretical and not much in the way of actually solving problems in real time. And I remember watching parkour and thinking, “This looks really fun, it looks so great, let’s see if I can do it.” I tracked him down in London, where he ran a parkour school, and started with him. Eventually, we turned into just a group of friends who went out and trained together every week.
When I moved to New York, I had a young kid. So I used to take him to the playground every day, and I’d run and jump around the playground for fun. But one of the things about parkour is that the impact on your ankles, knees, and hips starts to catch up with you as you get older. Also, because it’s mainly outdoors, it’s seasonal. It’s very hard to train in winter.
Post Covid, I needed to do something for physical exercise and mental health. I brought my son in for a trial class, and he ended up training for about 4 months. I also did a trial class but didn’t start. A year later, I went back for a second trial class and started training. I still remember this: my very first trial class was a Mathaus Saturday class, and he paired me up with Colman. My second trial a year later was a Mathaus Saturday class, and I got paired with Colman. I knew I would enjoy it, so I joined the gym. About a month after I started training, I said to my wife, “I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Something I didn’t even realize was there.”
One of my major motivating factors is finding a way to enjoy what I’m doing. I didn’t do jiu-jitsu to be good at jiu-jitsu. I did jiu-jitsu to be better in life. Getting better at jiu-jitsu is just part of the fun.
Q: How does it make you better in life?
In modern society, physical benefits are underrated in terms of how much they can benefit you. It’s important to be healthy. If I want to do things, having a capable body is important.
Q: What kind of things do you want to do?
I’ve got young kids. I want to pick them up from school and take them to the park. My two boys are now nine and six. So that’s really important to me. Family and being physically healthy.
Physical health also ties into mental health. A lot of the time, we think of it as: get your mental health right, and then get your physical health right. But doing things physically can start the trend for improving your mental health.
Whether you come twice or five times a week, each one-hour class requires you to be present. You’re either present, or you’re getting choked. It’s not like going to the gym lifting weights, where your mind wanders, or running while thinking about everything else in life. You forget about everything else that happened in the other 23 hours of the day. It’s a really good mental reset.
It’s almost a cliché in the jiu-jitsu community that jiu-jitsu is therapy. But it really is. There’s a meditative aspect to it that’s really helpful. You have to be present and forget everything else for an hour. After that reset, you come back with a clearer mind and maybe a little more perspective.
For me, jiu-jitsu was the lead domino. I knew my life needed to improve. Jiu-jitsu was just the way to get on that treadmill and start the process.
Q: Were you conscious of what other dominoes needed to fall?
No. I just knew I was being very unhealthy. And mentally, especially after Covid, I wasn’t in a great place. I was very angry. We were isolated. Everyone was stuck indoors together for months. The kids went back to school part-time, in person and remotely. Sitting six feet apart. Wearing masks. Plenty of kids had development issues because of all that. All kinds of things we had to deal with.
So I knew I needed to be in a better place. It was something fun, a way to create a lifestyle habit, and I knew there would be benefits that would lead to other benefits. So when people ask, “Should I get fit before starting jiu-jitsu?” I always say no—just start. Your goal is not to be great. Your goal is to come in and have fun. Because if you make that a habit, the other benefits will follow.
For me, when I started training, I could only make two sessions during the week, then I would try to come in on Saturday. The evening sessions were hard because that was dinner and bedtime routine for my children. So the only class I could make was the 8 pm. This was before 8 o’clock classes were really a thing. It was just two days a week and specific training with no rolling. It was like 40 minutes. The good and bad thing was that no one wanted to take that class. So sometimes it was literally just like a private lesson with Sapo. Then I’d try to come in on Saturdays because I could get in extra rounds.
Even though I’m very inquisitive and technical and love working on specific things to improve, there are periods when I come in and I’m like, I’m not working on anything right now. I just need to have fun. I need to roll with people, I need to laugh, I need to try something stupid that I saw on Instagram. And when it doesn’t work, I just laugh about it. Because that’s just what I need right now.
Q: There’s something to laughing at yourself. It took me a little while to get there, but now it comes automatically. If I get tapped, I laugh. At first, I tried to make myself laugh, but then I realized it was actually funny. It’s not a big deal. Tap, go about your day.
Yeah, it’s not a big deal. And actually, one of the best things to learn when you start jiu-jitsu is that you’ve got to get rid of that, for lack of a better word, ego, to really learn.
One of the best ways to do that is to start in the worst positions. When I first started, after I had gotten used to things and began to understand the meta-game of different positions and my sense of progression in a particular round, I decided to work on back escapes because the back is the worst position in jiu-jitsu.
The first thing I learned was how not to panic. Whenever I found myself panicking in a specific position, I knew that was an area I needed to work on. I wasn’t trying to work on any specific techniques yet—just working on not panicking.
First: don’t panic. Then what do you need to not panic? You need to be comfortable. Which means you need to be able to carry someone’s body weight without feeling like you’re getting crushed. So: good frames. Just get good frames, don’t panic, breathe. Then the next step is defense: don’t get submitted. There’s no point trying to push to escape if you’re exposing your arm or neck. And then eventually you get to the escape, right? You work on various escape techniques. You get to another position and you usually end up in a slightly less bad position. So then you start to work on that.
And that entire time, you understand that because you’re deliberately putting yourself in the worst positions in jiu-jitsu, the percentage of times you escape is going to be lower than the percentage of times you get submitted. You just have to be okay with that. So you learn to tap, and you learn to be okay with tapping.
And as you train with people, you start to feel them out—how they train, their pace—and you start to pick training partners who really help you.
When I say “take my back,” they know the pace I’m trying to go at. They know when to increase intensity and when to slow down a bit so I can work. That’s a real skill. But together you figure that out over time. A big part of that comes down to having good partners.
Q: Gi or no-gi?
I do both. If I had a preference, I’d probably say gi, but that might just be because I trained in the gi first.
I also find that as you get older, it’s harder to keep up with younger guys in no-gi. It’s much more scrambly, more transitions, more fast-paced because it’s harder to control people. But I try to train no-gi at least once a week. I think it’s good to do both, and I’ve actually noticed that doing no-gi helps my gi game.
When you first start no-gi, you feel like a fish out of water because you immediately go for grips and they’re not there. You’re one second late and that’s too late in jiu-jitsu. But once you get over that and stop relying on grips, you start to see that it’s actually about 80% the same. Without grips to rely on, you have to control people with weight distribution. It improves that and the use of collar ties and underhooks. Then you bring that back into your gi game and it improves tremendously.
Q: Do you do anything outside the gym to protect your body?
When I started training five days a week, I realized I had to take recovery seriously. One thing I started doing was cold showers. I do one every morning, no matter where I am in the world, and another after training to help with inflammation and recovery.
At first, I hated it. I don’t handle cold well, and winters are rough for me. But I knew it would be good for me, so I approached it the same way I approach jiu-jitsu: by building a habit. I started with five seconds under cold water. That was it. After a week, I added a second, then another. Eventually, I worked up to a few minutes.
There’s a saying that people overestimate what they can accomplish in a month and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year. That was my mindset. A five-second cold shower doesn’t do much on its own, but the habit lasts. And once the habit is there, benefits follow. For me, it’s the same philosophy as jiu-jitsu. I’m not trying to be a professional. I just want to be doing this in thirty or forty years. And the only way that happens is if the habits are sustainable.
Q: Did your kids go back to training?
My kids went back to training at the kids’ class here. Both of them train three days a week.
Q: That’s amazing. And they like it?
Honestly, it’s irrelevant. I knew they would complain about it and not enjoy it at the start. So I told them we were going to do it until the end of the school year. My hope was that over time they would see their progress and that would motivate them.
And it did. When they both earned their first stripe, it was a huge motivating factor. All of a sudden, there was a lightbulb moment from one day to the next. Their enthusiasm for training changed dramatically. It was night and day, because they felt a sense of progress.
One of the main reasons I wanted my kids to train wasn’t necessarily the jiu-jitsu skill. I didn’t start for the jiu-jitsu skill: that’s just the fun part. For my kids, it was something else. I needed them to do something physical. I needed them to do something challenging. Challenging to the point where sometimes I told them, “I don’t care if you want to go or not. This is what we do. We go.”
Because they needed to understand the benefits of doing something even when you don’t want to do it. That’s not something that clicks overnight. That takes months of training before it sinks in. I needed them to feel their bodies more so they could feel physically confident. And I also needed them to be humbled. They need some humility. Because when you don’t do anything competitive, you don’t learn how to lose. And they need to learn how to lose. More importantly, they need to learn how to lose properly.
One thing I love about this place is the kids’ program. They train under Mathaus, and he’s a fantastic coach. He knows all the children individually. He watches them carefully and knows how to pair them up. He knows when a kid needs a confidence boost. He’ll pair them with someone evenly matched so they can get a takedown or take the back and feel successful. But he also knows when a kid needs a lesson. Then they get smashed. And kids need that.
My kids needed to learn how to lose. I keep telling them: it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. I’m not interested in that. What I want to see is that you get up, shake hands, and say “thank you for the round.” End of story.
Without pushing kids over the edge—because that can happen too—the earlier they’re exposed to challenges, the better it is for them.
This interview is part of the Murder Yoga Cantina series, which explores the people who make up jiu-jitsu culture.
