John Danaher

Once they get this down, that's where true confidence comes from.

Confidence doesn't come from words, it comes from accumulated skills, which experience shows you have been responsible for successful performances in the past.

And if you accumulate enough of these, your confidence rises.

So, when it comes to the mental aspects of competition, I created a program where everyone was given a set of skills that they had to work on.

Skills directly related to what I believe is the most important elements of success in ADCC competition.

In the gym, they accumulated those skills over time.

I do it in two different ways, depending on whether these are offensive skills or defensive skills.

For the accumulation of offensive skills, I like to have my athletes work with athletes who are lesser than themselves in ability so that they start to gain confidence over time.

Just as you would never send a beginner into a weightlifting gym and put 500 pounds on the bar and tell them to lift it, rather you would start with

a wooden bar, then the metal bar, and then gradually accumulate weight over time, so you get a progression in weightlifting.

So to in jiu-jitsu, you don't take a brand new move and say, okay, do it on Gordon Ryan.

Never going to succeed.

I have the athletes practice their offense on blue belts and work their way up.

Defense, on the other hand, you've got to start them in the deep end of the pool so that they start to see what are their vulnerabilities.

So I put them with highly competitive athletes at the start so they can see, okay, there is a problem here.

And then even in defense, they start off with lower belts and build up their confidence over time.

So just as a weightlifter builds up

his ability to build weight, sorry, to lift weight over time, so too a jiu-jitsu player does it, by gradually increasing resistance.

Now in jiu-jitsu, resistance is not done by weight, it's done by skill level.

And so over time, they started to accumulate this experience.