ADCC veteran Robert Drysdale appeared on a recent episode of the Wash Your Gi podcast, where he offered a sharp assessment of BJJ practitioners.
“It’s never your coach. It’s never your training partners. It’s never your girlfriend. It’s never the referee. It’s always you,” Drysdale said. “Your coach at best is 1% responsible for your journey, which is ironic because people put this hyper focus on the coach.”
The statement challenges one of the most durable assumptions in martial arts culture: that finding the right coach is the central variable in a practitioner’s development. According to Drysdale, that kind of thinking reflects avoidance.
He stated: “Man, if with that mindset, you’re not making it anywhere. It’s just an easy way out.”
Ryan Hall, another veteran grappler with years of competitive and coaching experience, has approached the same problem from a different angle. Hall has argued for years that most practitioners do not fully understand what they are actually asking for when they look for a coach. In his view, the word gets applied loosely to something that is, in reality, far more limited.
“A lot of times people think they want a coach, but they really want an instructor,” Hall has explained. According to him, an instructor delivers information while a coach carries a student’s development as an ongoing responsibility, one that extends well beyond scheduled mat time.
He said, “Coach is a relationship that gets developed. Can you imagine just the amount of emotional investment and time thinking away from, oh, Lex isn’t here anymore, what can I do to help him? What does he need? That’s serious.”
Hall is also direct about what money does and does not buy in this equation. He said: “Me giving you $150 for a month, that does not, that pays for instructor.”
The deeper investment that defines true coaching, he argues, cannot be purchased or instantly established. “There’s that mutual understanding and mutual belief of goodwill, which again, doesn’t just magic up out of nowhere,” he mentioned.
Even granting Hall’s framework, Drysdale’s point holds its ground. Even the most committed coach, the one who is thinking about your development between sessions and investing genuinely in your growth, represents only a fraction of the total equation. The athlete fills the rest.
This is precisely where Drysdale sees a serious breakdown occurring in the current generation of practitioners. He said, “I think that’s a huge problem in jiu-jitsu. We see this everywhere. People have the wrong metrics in sight. They’re more worried about followers than they were about being great.”
What follows from that misalignment, in Drysdale’s view, is a practitioner who has made themselves nearly impossible to develop. “You can’t help someone whose heart is more invested in approval on social media than it is in being great on the mats. Your heart’s in the wrong place. How am I supposed to make a diamond out of you with what you’re giving me? You’re not giving me what I need to help sharpen you into a diamond.”
“It’s a generation of very, very self-centered practitioners, man. It’s very difficult to deal with,” Drysdale said.
His authority on these matters is grounded in serious historical research. Drysdale has spent years tracing the origins of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, arriving at conclusions that challenge some of the sport’s most popular origin narratives.
He has argued that what practitioners recognize as BJJ today is far younger than commonly assumed, with its defining ground-oriented rule set taking shape in August 1975 rather than in the Gracie family’s early decades.
He said, “I would argue 1975, hence 50 years of a martial arts revolution, because that’s when the ground orientation begins to distinguish the Brazilian version of jiu-jitsu or judo from official Kodokan judo, because up to then, it’s not so different.”
That perspective, the ability to trace how a discipline transforms across generations, carries over into how Drysdale views athletic development. Great practitioners are built slowly, from the inside out.
Hall, reflecting on the athletes he has observed over the years, reached a similar conclusion. “All the athletes that I know, the guys and girls that I’ve watched become fantastic in various places, almost invariably, it never happened to one.”
