February 18, 2019
By Aaron Martinez
Why I don’t cross train at other gyms
When I first started training I was so excited to learn Jiu-Jitsu that I remember wanting to go to all the other academies to train. Before I started driving around and paying drop-in fees I found out that my head instructor really didn’t want us training at other schools. I never asked why and I didn’t care to speculate. I was happy at my school and loved my team. There was no reason to train somewhere else and go against my instructor, even if I thought he’d never know.
Now, as an instructor and a competitor I have a clear perspective on cross training. I don’t do it, I don’t like it and I’d prefer that my students and teammates didn’t do it as well. The common assumption by students is that their instructor wants to control their students and is afraid that cross-training students will leave their academy for another after visiting enough schools. This is not my motivation for staying away from other schools, and there are perfectly good reasons for attending other schools under other circumstances.
But here are a few common reasons why I have heard it is good to cross train and my reasons why I don’t agree with them.
- It’s good to go against other styles and roll with people you don’t regularly train with. I agree, and that’s why I compete. Why would I want to go around feeling good or bad about my jiu-jitsu over sparing with someone when I can compete against them on the highest level with zero excuses?
- My friend trains there. Mine too, and I’m going to have a cup of coffee with him later. I don’t need to train with someone to be friends with someone. If my friends want to train with me they can join our school and train with me every day.
- I want to train as much as possible and we don’t have training on that day at that time.Then that is a good day and time for you rest and recover before training hard with your team the next session. Every session you miss with your team, or you can’t give 100% because you trained somewhere else gets your team further away from their goal. Instead of helping your team, you’re only helping yourself and a group of others that might actually compete against your teammates down the road.
The truth is that there are good reasons to train at other schools. If you’re traveling, if they are an affiliate of your school, if you are participating in an event like a seminar, if you cross train as a team etc.
I also understand that at a certain point, a practitioner want’s to train with similar training partners that their academy just simply lacks. High level females, professional level black belts, rooster weights, ultra-heavy weights, etc. These aren’t terribly selfish reasons to train elsewhere in my opinion, but there is a goal behind it: to get ready for competition.
And that’s where the difference comes in as an individual. As a competitor, I’m training with competition in mind. That is the focus of my training and reasons to decide why I don’t want to cross train. I really believe that if I leave my team to train somewhere else for competition I am never going to have the training partners and school I would need to get ready for competition. It’s the symbiotic nature of training together. Everyone is helping each other get better; consistently over time. Every time a main training partner is absent because they are training somewhere else our training suffers.
If you don’t compete and sparing is your competition then I understand why you’d want to branch out and train with other people. To me, it’s silly to be that competitive and not actually compete, but maybe I’m wrong and there is something I just don’t understand. I’m open to hearing your input.