Stealth Mode on Matwork

Hurray! (Sssh!) We are in stealth mode on the book. You know how tech start-ups are all excited about what they're doing and everyone tells all their friends,

"Hey, yeah, we've got this new company and it's going to be a search engine like Netscape, but we've got this search algorithm ..."

And then, all of a sudden those guys disappear off the face of the earth, because they're locked in an office somewhere cranking out iterations of that algorithm ... okay... maybe you don't know people like that .... anyway, my point is, I was talking about this book a lot and now I have kind of fallen off the face of the blogosphere.

The reason is that we actually got the photos taken, a complete draft from beginning to end, and now we are finishing up the writing. We also have signed a contract with Black Belt saying that we won't publish sections of the book elsewhere, which makes sense. They took some incredibly great photos - over 1,000 I'm sure - with Ronda, with Kayla Harrison, Crystal Butts and Aaron Kunihiro. Also, with Travis who came down from (I think) Fresno to train in mixed martial arts with Ronda and Manny and ended up roped into being a throwing dummy for a day.

I guess you'll just have to buy the book to see them.

One thing that I can tell you is that Jim and I are definitely going to have another debate when he gets back from Brazil. I know that he hates some of the techniques I put into the book. He would say he doesn't "hate" them, that they're just wrong and that's a fact. Trust me, he hates them.

In the first chapter, I have some very, very basic techniques, like this one, for example:

He says that it is a mistake to grab your opponent around the neck and he makes the kids do bunny hops if they do it. Instead, Jim argues, you should get behind your opponent. He also says that you almost never see anyone do that except for beginners. Maybe Jim is right - well, not about the bunny hops. Bunny hops suck.

My point, though, is that beginners DO do this move and they do it incorrectly, so that allows the opportunity to teach mat work counters. Also, everyone starts out as beginners and almost everyone teaches beginners. So, even though there are a lot of more advanced mat work techniques in our book, I think there should be some basic stuff. My final reason for including these wrong - or, at least, very basic techniques - is that I think winning mat work comes from good habits and from learning to THINK in a certain way, to always be looking one step ahead. That is one point on which Jim and I are in 100% agreement. I think some of these basic moves get people started, easily, doing mat work combinations and counters from the beginning.

To me, it is like the "Hello, World" program that just about every programming language tutorial and textbook uses as a beginning example. No, no one really needs a program that prints, "Hello, World" but pretty much everybody needs to learn how to produce some kind of output readable by a human.

The other reason that I have been incognito is that I was trying to finish off all of the other grants and contracts I was working on so I could spend the next few months focusing on this book and another project. I'd tell you about that one, but it's in stealth mode.