Book Monday 6/23/25

It has been my experience that the majority of people training today under a Self-Preservation modality tend to have come into it sometime in the last 15 years or less. As such, they don’t really know what it was like to do this in the 70’s – to early 00’s. Today, we are blessed that there is so much information that can easily be accessed in seconds with the amazing piece of machinery most of us have in our pocket. Back in the day however, those of us who have been at this for many decades were not so fortunate. 

Prior to 2010-ish, we had to work hard to get information to help our journey. One way that was hugely helpful were books. There were not many of them, and many of those were complete crap, but there were good ones. 

For me and my BJJ-centric journey, Saulo Ribeiro’s Jiu-Jitsu University was probably the biggest help in those days of low information. Saulo really organized his writing and made the chaos and ambiguity of jiu-jitsu more manageable. To this day I still use some terms and specific lessons from the book. I strongly encourage anyone doing jiu-jitsu or just thinking about it to try to check the book out.