Individual sports and martial arts are unique in that they often require an immense amount of teamwork to build a successful individual performance or development. This concept is unique in individual sports because in the heat of the moment only one person is responsible for the success and failure of the battle. However, to prepare and execute in battle it takes an entire team to do so. In life, just like in these individual sports, there are individual responsibilities that contribute to the success of the entire group. The ability to recognize your individual responsibility and contribute to the team is essential. This contribution might come in the form of being a leader, a follower, a silent voice of action, or mustering people together with your words and action. Needless to say we work on both of these skills on the mat at edh jiujitsu.

Only those that work together can be the strongest! Here, we aren’t just building grip and leg strength. At our martial arts academy in El Dorado Hills we don’t just teach technical and physical skills, we also teach skills of collaboration and working with others. This is a skill that is important on the mat but even more important in life off of the mat. One example of teamwork being taught is through “tug of war” a team of strong individuals won’t beat a team of averaged strength individuals all working together. In doing so we talk about leadership, in this example the leader is the one getting everyone to pull all at once. We also talk about being led, in this case those that agree to all pull at the same time.

It’s intriguing to see the different personalities come out when we do these training sessions. Some follow, some lead, argue, quit, persevere, but in the end we all begin to see the strength and value in working together.