Giancarlo Bodoni recently sat down with interviewers at FloGrappling to give a little bit of insight into his training under John Danaher and how they approach new trends in BJJ at New Wave Jiu-Jitsu. It’s a very important topic as far as any training room goes, because being able to predict what everyone else is doing or will be doing in the future is a huge benefit. Not only does it allow competitors to better prepare for their opponents right now but it also allows them to stay ahead of the curve and present new challenges that their opponents may not be prepared for.
Bodoni was clear that Danaher sees the value of this too and he works even further in advance than most instructors do:
“John (Danaher) is always trying to stay ahead of the curve, as you guys know… I feel like whatever people are working on now is stuff that we were working on six months ago and when he starts to see trends come out in Jiu-Jitsu, he likes to already have us working on the next trend.”
“If there’s an ankle-lock trend, we’re not just doing it while everybody else is doing it, you know what I mean? That’s not to say we’re the only trendsetters in the sport but I do like to, I think it kinda goes without saying that John does kind’ve have that little bit of an edge where he watches every body and he’s able to see. I mean, he’s legitimately predicted two years ago that in six months people are going to be doing this, in a year people are going to be doing that; and it happens. So people are going to be doing this, that means that we need to be doing that.”
That intense level of preparation for trends in BJJ is very important for Giancarlo Bodoni and the other elite competitors training under John Danaher. Other competitors have spoken about how valuable it is to have Danaher as a coach, and Bodoni echoed some of those sentiments too:
“That’s definitely a huge part of our camps. I think we’re really lucky to be able to have somebody that just has eyes on everything and is able to see those things coming, and be ahead of the curve like that. So yeah that’s a huge part of all of our camps and specifically for ADCC I think that he’s very good, and it’s very difficult to do this I think in any area of life, but to play the long game. He’s so patient and so willing to make little incremental adjustments and improvements on a day-to-day basis, that ultimately build up to something big. Whereas I think for most people, we’re always looking for something that’s immediate.”
John Danaher doesn’t just have one eye on the future of BJJ either, Giancarlo Bodoni explained that he also pays attention to trends in other grappling sports as well:
“Even just yesterday, we’re in the training room and he’s like ‘hey there was a guy during the Olympics, this move was working really well and I think we can tweak it and make it good for Jiu-Jitsu’ and we’re there and we’re experimenting. This is just a couple of weeks after ADCC, where normally people would just be kind’ve relaxing in the training room and just kinda training for fun. He’s already thinking like ‘how can we incorporate this to be beneficial for us in the next ADCC?’ Which is two years away.“
Obviously it’s not always going to be possible to take something from wrestling or Judo and make it work in BJJ, nor is it possible to be completely accurate about trends in the sport. Bodoni explained that because they experiment a lot in the training room, they have to know when to move on as well:
”Sometimes we’ll spend hours going over stuff and he’ll say ‘hey what do you think about this? OK, try it with a little bit of resistance and increase resistance.’ And then when we feel like that’s not working, oh maybe this is bulls**t, let’s get rid of it. There’s definitely a lot of that. I would say that a lot of times there’s more stuff you get rid of than there is stuff you keep. You know because there’s so many variables to what makes a move work, that if you don’t think it can really really work at the highest level against a bunch of different styles and a bunch of different physicalities and stuff like that, it’s probably better to dump it and pick something that’s reliable. So there’s definitely a lot of that for sure.”
FloGrappling uploaded the full interview with Giancarlo Bodoni where he breaks down how John Danaher approaches trends in BJJ in a recent video:
