What your jiu jitsu look like? One of the most obvious features of jiu jitsu as a sport is the tremendous variation among the many top players as they work for supremacy. It is very clear that there is no one body type, psychology or style that dominates the sport. Rather, we see many very different exercise their unique individuality to get to the top. A natural question to ask is – WHAT WILL MY GAME LOOK LIKE? We all want a sense of identity within the sport. Realize this: your game will be a r reflection of many factors, but three will have the greatest effect. Your BODY TYPE, PERSONALITY and COACHING LINEAGE will be the biggest influences in building who you are as you mature within the sport. We all need to learn the and they don't change much from athlete to athlete, but once you go beyond that into more advanced elements, you will be actively CHOOSING which techniques you will focus upon. Your body type will play a heavy role in those choices. You will also be choosing how you actually apply them (in an aggressive proactive fashion vs a passive reactive fashion for example) and your personality will play a massive role here. The third decisive element is the influence of your various coaches and role models. They have their respective strengths and weaknesses and will teach accordingly, obviously doing a better job with their strengths. This will filter through naturally to the . These three influences, your body type, personality and teachers, will be responsible for most of the choices you make as you build a game that is an of who you are. It would seem that two of the influences, body type and personality, are internal, whilst the third, coaches, are external, but really even the third is internal, since it is an act of choice who we select to stay with as a . When students ask me what directions they ought to take their game, I always counsel them to relax and let their body type and personality make the decisions for them . It will happen organically over time without the need for prompting Photo by @supersaiyanmagicalgirl