Worth Defending Quotes

“You never know when something as random as a spare waterbed mattress is going to turn your whole world around.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“It took me a long time to learn and realize and internalize the fact that everyone feels fear. Even your heroes feel fear.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Like any friend you have it's got its personal beliefs and its hangups and its limitations. But at the end of the day your fear loves you and it wants to keep you safe.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“For ten years, from 1979 to 1989, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in America pretty much meant you were rolling around on the floor in a garage in Southern California. Think about keeping that little fire lit for ten years, when it's not catching. Ten years is longer than most people last in Jiu-Jitsu. It's a long haul.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“When you're in your late twenties and early thirties you go at things with some degree of reckless abandon, and if you're lucky enough to survive then you get the chance to learn from it.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“I've heard Rener and other people say that after about the age of forty, every ten years, you lose a ranking in effectiveness when you're rolling. Which is just a fact of nature. We all get older, we all get weaker, we all slow down, we all die.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“I got my blue belt after forty half-hour private classes. When Rorion promoted me he said, "OK, you're not a beginner anymore. Now your Jiu-Jitsu journey has begun." Now at the Gracie University it's much more than forty classes to get a blue belt.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“There needs to be a sense that everyone is doing Jiu-Jitsu, even the people who are just learning the self-defense. Even the people who never compete. Even the people who only roll with the one or two training partners they know and trust and feel comfortable with. There needs to be a sense that it's all legitimate, that it's all Jiu-Jitsu.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Hélio Gracie made comments that he never wanted to teach a guy bigger than 175 pounds. That Jiu-Jitsu wasn't for the big, strong guys, it was for the smaller and weaker people to be able to defend themselves against those big, strong guys. When you teach those big guys you're basically teaching them how to beat you.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“It's funny. When you're coming up and you're striving for your black belt it seems so, so important. I've been a black belt for over twenty years, now. I've been a black belt for longer than it took me to get to black belt: longer than it took me to get through all the other belts combined. At some point in all of that you start to realize that the belt don't actually matter. You start to realize that what matters is being on the mat. What matters is the time you get to spend with this art. The rest of it is just window dressing.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“I never forget that, for most people, it's a huge thing for them to just walk in the door for the first time. I never lose sight of the fact that that person is really putting themselves out there.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Rorion used to say that when a person walks into a Jiu-Jitsu school they're never walking in thinking, I wonder if these guys can teach me to be a world champion. The first thing on the average person's mind when they walk into a martial arts school is self-defense. They're walking in because they want to learn how to defend themselves in a worst-case scenario out in the world. That's most people's underlying insecurity.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“The whole sport Jiu-Jitsu movement has really confused things. It's really confused what people teach, because a lot of it is based around a competitor's presumed attributes. A competitor—the kind of person who becomes a competitor—is almost certain to be an athlete. He or she is almost certain to be someone who's got some innate athletic ability. Apart from that, they expect that they're going to be in peak physical condition in the tournament, when they're going to be executing these moves. That's the criteria that decides what moves get taught: whether an athlete in peak condition can perform these moves effectively against someone his or her own size. Which is fine—but it isn't most people, and it isn't the context that most people are interested in or concerned about.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“If you explode and it isn't enough, or it isn't exactly the perfect time, you dump all of this energy that you didn't have to spare and it all comes to nothing.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Negative goals don't work. You focus on what you want to do, not on what you don't want to do.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“If you feel pain, listen to what your body is telling you and find the cause and resolve the issue. Don't mask the pain and expect the deeper issue to magically disappear, because it won't.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“You're allowed to be selective about who you train with, especially as you get older. If you want to stay on the mat for the long haul, you need to be selective.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Unless you're currently training to become or stay a top-level competitor, you need to think about Jiu-Jitsu not as a sprint, not even as a marathon, but as a hike you stay on for the rest of your life.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Look at Royce's fight with Kimo. You see the pace of that fight and you can watch Royce get drawn in and exhausted. And then you look at Royce's fight against Dan Severn in the next event, and you see a very different Royce. You see a very different approach, in terms of how he dealt with a big, powerful guy who's on top and who's not wearing the gi. You see the classical tactical deployment of patience as a strategy. And that's the thing: that's what Jiu-Jitsu is. That's what it's supposed to be.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“People forget that modern MMA has weight classes and time limits and the guys are wearing gloves. Take those things away and you'll realize very quickly why the art is the way it is.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Young guys come in the door with a lot of miseducation about what a fight looks like and what's going to be effective, and the ironic thing is that it's from the UFC.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“One of the things that Rorion used to say was, "You don't need Jiu-Jitsu if your opponents are small.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“For me, there's only a couple of things worth fighting for. I'll protect myself and I'll protect a loved one. Other than that, I don't care. I don't care what you call me, I don't care what you say. It's just not worth it. It's not worth it on so many levels.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“There's still so much that gets taught and passed around in the martial arts that's based on theory and not on data. There's so much that gets taught based on somebody's theory about what would happen in a fight. I tell people, "Look, the work has been for you. This is what happens when fights hit the ground. This is what works." Guys come in with these ideas about biting and poking eyes and grabbing fingers, thinking that they can strike their way out when they get stuck. They've never done these things, and they've never trained with anybody who's done them successfully. Their whole plan is based on theory, on what they think might happen.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“A person will tell you a lot about themselves on the mat.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Think about a big, strong white belt on his first day of class. What's it like rolling with him? You probably catch him, but up until that point it's kind of crazy, kind of wild and unpredictable. It's different from rolling with a blue belt who may be good and fast but who's mostly doing moves that are recognizable as Jiu-Jitsu. But the thing is, the average guy you fight out in the street is going to be a lot more like the white belt. When you get mounted on a guy like that, you can't rush into things. You have to focus on weathering the storm.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“There are no neutral actions, no neutral foods. Everything either builds health or destroys health.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“You're only as healthy as the most toxic part of your life.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Most therapies take the approach that if you change the inside then the outside will change. That hasn't been my experience. In my experience, it's the other way around. You take what you're doing now that you don't like and you figure out what you want to do instead and you just start doing it. You change what's happening outside, and the inside follows. And that's it.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“Everything changes when you say, "What's it going to take for me to change the way I feel?" Just by articulating the question differently—orienting it around the solution—you change where you put your focus. And when your focus shifts, it changes where you put your energy. And when that happens, things start to change in your life.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life