10 Questions With the Man Who Built the Best Gym I've Ever Trained At
Interview with my professor sensei, Jeff Serafin.
I’m really excited about this one.
Today, I’ve got an interview with one of the hidden gems in the BJJ world.
Jeff Serafin is a BJJ black belt, former professional MMA fighter, and perhaps one of the best Jiu-Jitsu coaches in the world today. He’s definitely the best Jiu-Jitsu coach I’ve ever met — and I’ve met and worked with some pretty good ones.
I’m biased, I will admit. Jeff is the man who has coached me for nearly 9 years and gave me my black belt just over 2 years ago.
In this interview, Jeff told me about Jiu-Jitsu's true history (that’s a little different from what you might have thought), how to become a better instructor, and how to design a curriculum that will help your students succeed. If you’re passionate about Jiu-Jitsu you will love and learn something from this mega-article (nearly 3000 words long!).
Enjoy!
If you could go back in time and talk to yourself right after opening your gym, what is one piece of advice you’d give yourself that would make you a better instructor faster?
The advice I’d give myself would be to simply: don’t try to teach BJJ to impress students or show how much you know.
Teach the BJJ you know and believe in. When I first started my program, I had taught quite a bit but mainly privates, covering classes, and worked with high-level competitors for BJJ and MMA, so I didn’t know my audience for a regular gym.
I tended to teach too many moves, too many details, and with the idea that everyone was a BJJ nerd like me who wanted the deepest level of knowledge possible.
As I began to get more experience running an academy, I realized students need to be given smaller and easily digestible amounts of information that we could build on over time.
An armbar with 12 steps could work for a purple belt in a private but not a room full of varied experiences who didn’t have the prerequisites to understand all the finer details.
Now I’d teach the armbar with 4 details and each time I show It over the week, or the next time I show it months later I’d focus on different details so that after many times seeing and practicing the move a student could take the details, they found most effective.
On a similar note, I see some instructors teaching stuff that they never did coming up but just watch an instructional and show moves like they understand them on a deep level without putting time into learning the fine details.
The average student isn’t going to have watched the last Pans or ADCC and doesn’t care what the current meta so don’t worry about wowing them with the latest and greatest, teach them solid BJJ you have knowledge and confidence in and your students will prosper.
If someone came to you asking for advice on building a gym culture (like yours), what would you tell them?
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