Competition Goals

The vast majority of people who train BJJ will never compete, and those who do, will do it maybe just a handful of times.  There are various factors and reasons why people compete.  I'm going to analyze a few certain types of competitors.

The Just For Fun Guy:
We all know guys like this, they compete just for the fun of it.  Their initial mindset of it being just for fun puts them at a disadvantage as they either are not taking the competition seriously or they are putting that phrase out there as their excuse for not performing.  Their goal is to just go out there and compete.  They often lose their first match and look to roll about 1/2 the speed of their opponent.  These guys are typically happy to just say they competed, hoping to have a small enough bracket to get that 0-1 bronze medal.  He'll go home and happily put it in his trophy case and boast about his accomplishments. He'll even believe that he "earned" that bronze medal. 

The Never Trains But Always Competes Guy:
 I don't know what drives these guys to compete.  They hardly ever achieve any kind of success in tournaments.  When they do come to train, they are the bottom of their belt's totem pole, and yet they compete in every tournament available.  I know a handful of these guys and rarely have heard any of them win a match.  I am utterly clueless on this kind of mentality.  Tournaments are not cheap, and to go completely unprepared with close to no chance of winning sounds like a terrible way to spend money.  Don't be this guy.

The Gym Champion:
Every gym has one of these guys.  He's the blue or purple belt who regularly submits higher belts.  You never see him getting dominated in class, his technique is outstanding, but put him in a tournament and you'll wonder what in the hell happened to him.  These guys just cannot seem to connect the dots between the way they train in the gym and compete in a tournament.  I can only guess that their confidence goes way out the window come tournament time.  I've known a few of these guys throughout the years and one of them told me they had so much pressure from guys saying "man you'd kill it at a tournament" that they just drop the ball.  There is a lot they need to learn mentally in order for their success to translate from the gym to the competitions.  Tournaments are full of pretend pressures, being able to channel them in a different way can help bridge that translation of training to competing.

The Reverse Gym Champion:
These are the guys that get dominated in training and then kill it at tournaments.  They are used to getting smashed in class to the point where it doesn't bother them, come tournament time they are not intimidated and nobody expects them to win anything and then they end up winning the whole thing.  It's one of the most bizarre types of guys, but I've known a few.  One of which was tricked into competing at the Pan Ams (this was a decade ago).  So we had a group of guys go to the Pan Ams, one of them was a white belt who was going just to watch.  Unbeknownst to him, the other guys signed him up to compete (there was no white belt division at the time, so he was put into blue).  He begrudgingly competed and ended up with a silver medal.  Even our instructor was stunned "Really? He got silver? ... Seriously?"  My buddy earned his blue belt with that silver medal and then proceeded to get dominated by the whites belts for the next six months before he really started making strides.  Sometimes when people feel they truly have nothing to lose and very little pressure in that environment they can attain a great deal of success.

The Serious Competitor:
These are the guys that are professionals.  They are athletes.  They put their work in at the academy, they supplement with S&C, and follow a solid diet.  The guys in this category are the guys standing on the medal podium at the worlds.  They have to keep up everything at the highest level in order to obtain what they see as success.  They don't accept anything less than a gold medal as acceptable.  It takes an enormous amount of time, effort, and dedication to reach this kind of level, and gold medals are their bar of success. 

I know there are a bunch of other labels we can give to certain people and I'll augment this post as I figure out how to analyze them more thoroughly.  Enjoy!