Mastermind on the Mat

An interview with Henry Akins, Rickson Gracie Black-belt

After a few years of taekwondo training, Henry Akins began to wonder if what all his high school friends were doing — wrestling, as is the way in Oklahoma, USA — was a more effective form of fighting. Then someone showed him some fuzzy videos of the Gracie family fighting in no-holds-barred challenge matches. And before the inaugural UFC, before Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructors began a stampede into the United States to capitalise on the boom created by Royce Gracie’s notorious victories, the 18-year-old Akins was already on his way to Rickson Gracie’s academy in Los Angeles. During a recent visit to Melbourne, Akins chatted to Ben Stone about what he’s learned as a student of the man widely regarded as the toughest and most technical of the famous Gracie brothers.

Growing up in Oklahoma, it's a huge wrestling state. When I was in high school, all my friends were wrestlers and they would get in fights with these huge football players and they would take them down, put them on their back and pretty much beat the crap out of them. I was like ‘Wow', all these wrestlers who were very small were able to dominate these much bigger opponents and that made me want to find a martial art that was grappling-based. Even though I liked taekwondo, it was more of a sport for me; something I did for exercise. But as soon as I found out about BJJ, I told myself that's what I wanted to do.

I understand you worked in security for a long time in LA. Do you think BJJ on its own is an effective skill set to have?
Yeah, for sure. The thing about BJJ is that there's actually quite a bit of stand-up, but most schools don't teach so much of that aspect. Every situation and confrontation you get into in the street starts from the stand-up position. Another great aspect of BJJ is the fact that you can control an opponent without necessarily doing damage to them, and that's what many of my employers really liked about me knowing BJJ, as opposed to karate or kickboxing, because with those arts, in order to win a fight you have to beat [the aggressor] up, leaving cuts, black eyes and stuff like that. BJJ gave me a very humane way to deal with situations if they ever got out of hand.

Back when you started training with Rickson, it was a time when those Gracies based in the US were constantly accepting challenges as a way to prove the effectiveness of their art and thus make it grow in the West. Did this kind of thing happen at Rickson's academy?
Yeah, I actually did a couple of fights at the school. When I first started in 1995, there was that $100,000 offer that Rorion Gracie had for any who wanted to come in [and fight]. They didn't even have that kind of money, but they knew that anyone who came in was going to get whooped. When I was training there, we always had guys who came in wanting to do challenge matches and because the instructors were so tired, they proposed that if the challenger could beat one of their students, then they would agree to fight them. Shortly after I started I became a secretary at the school because I had nothing else to do all day, so I ended up doing a couple of the fights at the school, which was really fun. At that time I was just 18 and only 160 pounds. We had this kung fu guy that had been coming in for a couple of days in the morning and would watch my friend Jason, who was a Brown-belt, instruct his classes. Every time Jason would show a technique, the guy would shake his head or make snide remarks. One day he was in the gym just throwing [ninja] stars into the wall and we'd had enough. We asked him if he wanted to challenge anyone in the gym. I had only been training two months but I was begging Jason, "Dude, pick me! I'll do it." He agreed, so he told me to take off my gi and we just scrapped. I took the guy down twice, mounted him both times and arm-locked him. After that he signed up, of course. He was probably thinking ‘This guy has been doing it for two months, I've been training kung fu for 15 years and I just got destroyed by a kid' (laughs).

In business, competition and diversity drives evolution. Do you think the massive growth in popularity of BJJ in the US, and the West Coast especially, has done that?
Because it's so marketable and profitable, you get a lot of guys teaching it who don't really understand it. The same thing happened in karate, where guys would train for a few years, get a Black-belt and then open up their own school, because someone they knew was making a lot of money doing it. Thing is, they really don't know that much about it after only training for a few years. That leads you to think, how much can their students know about it, then? So things inevitably get watered down. I think the huge growth of Jiu-Jitsu has really made it slightly watered down. With all the schools wanting to prove themselves, competition has become really important and BJJ is evolving into more of a sport rather than a martial art, which is what it was intended to be.

With all the patch-covered gis, crazy moves and strong ties with the now very commercial sport of MMA, I think many people believe that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has long ago lost any connection to the traditional martial arts ethos. Having trained with the founding family, what's your opinion on this?
I know it's different at every school. For example, a school like Gracie Barra is more geared towards competition and you also have schools that base their games on the martial art and self-defence aspect. I know many parents want to get their kids into martial arts because of the discipline side of things, but at Rickson's gym we were all very laid back. I think the main strength of our gym was the sense of a strong bond between the guys you train with. I think BJJ is interesting in that you really develop a strong bond with your training partners. I don't want to call it intimate but you're training with the guy, sweating on him and trusting him to not hurt you. These things work towards a really strong bond between people and this is what develops the discipline and respect in that true martial arts way.

At my gym we don't force everyone to bow; everyone is really casual and addresses me as a friend, by my first name.

How important is tournament competition for overall improvement in the art, and is it the same for those who study purely for self-defence and fitness?
It's all the same. The style we teach is super basic. There aren't a lot of fancy techniques where guys jump around, spinning, flying. Everything we teach is effective for both competition, no-gi and MMA, otherwise we don't teach it. That doesn't mean that makes us less capable than those who focus solely on competition. Just because a guy is using tornado-guard or spider-guard, doesn't mean I can't counter it. I know what to do to nullify these positions, I just choose not to use and teach them. The techniques we teach are all very applicable for self-defence but are also very effective in competition.

I think most of the schools nowadays train simply for tournaments, so guys start to rely on these techniques where [for example] guys would pull the lapel open and tie people up with the gi. If they try to apply these types of techniques to self-defence, they'd probably take a lot of damage, so I think this has really regressed BJJ from its original intention. One of the things that was cool when I first started was that Rickson was still fighting a lot, and during the summer when there was less competition we would take off the gis and train with striking. We would train in order to beat guys from other martial arts, whereas nowadays guys train to beat other BJJ guys. They lose focus on the striking aspect; they don't realise if they choose to play deep-half guard they could get punched and elbowed in the face. This is a problem when you have guys trying to transition from BJJ to MMA. You find that even when guys are getting to the ground, where these guys are meant to be the experts, they don't know how to deal with a guy throwing strikes at them.

Because MMA is so popular, you get guys coming in wanting to learn BJJ because they've seen it on TV. But because they're new to the sport, they don't really know any better. They think that the competition techniques and aspects are what the sport is about. My days in security taught me that you always have to be ready for an opponent who's willing to strike you. In the street, you can't always grab his sleeve and play spider-guard. Spider-guard is something we don't really teach at my school, open guard as well. In tournaments I always see guys sitting down and doing a butt-scoot, which doesn't make sense because you could never really do that in a fight. Same thing with spider-guard, where you grab their sleeves and try to weave your legs inside [their legs and arms] - what if a guy is wearing a T-shirt? You can't do that. I think BJJ has really lost a lot of the martial arts aspect, much like taekwondo. Sadly, I think there are very few masters left in BJJ. There are a bunch of people who know heaps of techniques, but there are very few true masters.

The accepted wisdom is that every master needs either his own master or peers of equal skill and experience to continue testing himself and improving - as they say, ‘steel sharpens steel'. For a long time, Rickson was doing that through competing against the world's best in BJJ and MMA. Nowadays, after retiring from competition, how does a guy of Rickson's level keep testing himself and developing his skills?
He's been the best in the world [in BJJ] for the past 20, 30 years and he's still improving. It's his mind that sets him apart. He understands that it's about body mechanics and, in the end, if you can apply a technique to various situations, you know it's a good technique. The Jiu-Jitsu that Rickson does was so different and so improved even from what Helio [Rickson's father and the co-founder of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu] taught, even from his brothers. For example, you may have seen in the movie Choke, Rickson teaching Helio how to do the upa, it was slight variation but he made it way more effective. Through the 15 years I was training with him, I would see him begin to teach a technique a certain way and then in the later years he would do the same technique a little different, but better. You could see that he was always improving.

When you say that you need to train with ‘better' people in order to improve, I actually had a long discussion with Rickson about this and we came to the conclusion that you should always train with guys weaker and stronger than you. The stronger opponents will help you refine your defence, as they will have the dominant positions most of the time, whereas the weaker opponents help you develop your offence. However, what Rickson does, and what I still do, is if I'm training with guys weaker than me, there really isn't much point in just smashing them. Putting yourself in sticky situations with the lower grades helped me develop my game. Once I managed to escape from, say, a White-belt, I'd move on to a Blue-belt, then a Purple, etc... Rickson also used to make me train with one hand and sometimes no hands. By limiting yourself, you can still get awesome training with an opponent of any level.

I remember one crazy day where Rickson was training with seven Black-belts, calling them out one by one and putting them each in the crucifix hold five or six times each. By the time it was my turn, I knew what he was going to do and told myself I wasn't going to get caught in this crucifix, yet he was still able to catch me and everyone in the same move, despite them knowing exactly what he was trying to do.

I've improved a lot the last few years just from teaching, because you begin to understand more about the techniques, the leverage, all the little details. Rickson really taught me how to think, because once you really understand the principles and philosophies of BJJ, you can begin to apply them to everything and you can figure out your own mistakes. It's something I try to teach all my students. Because I came from a bit of a science background, I always found myself asking a lot of questions like why, how, and when certain things happen, so I really started to analyse and break down everything to get a better understanding of all the techniques. We'd have all these world champion Black-belts come in from Brazil every year and they'd have all these new techniques, and literally in a couple of minutes Rickson would have figured everything about the move, including the defence and its counters. In many ways I developed that skill as well, after watching him, and I encourage my students to think, too. I ask them questions and get them thinking about specific techniques, as opposed to just showing them: what do they need to do to escape? Where's their base? What is the opponent doing? What limbs do they have free?

So, given the culture of your school, do guys still come in and experiment with new and crazy moves?
Some guys do, but normally I like to let them know that I personally wouldn't use the move, especially in the street. A lot of it is from watching YouTube (laughs), but in reality people are just hungry for knowledge. Most people don't understand how simple the sport really is. Look at a guy like Roger Gracie, who goes into a tournament and smashes everyone doing the same thing: taking them down, mounting them and cross-choking them. This is a White-belt technique, but how is this guy so effective? He's catching high-level Black-belts with it but people fail to understand the subtleties that make simple things like that work. Rickson's style is, in my opinion, at the top. What's sad is that the brothers, particularly Rorion and Royce, have been separated for the past 15 years so all their ideas and theories never really got shared. This has somewhat led to this real tribal mentality in BJJ, where guys can't even go to other schools to train. I was dating Rorion's daughter, Rose, for a few years during the period of the falling out [between brothers Rickson and Rorion Gracie] and I would always get invitations to come down and train with them, but I would never go. Even nowadays there is so much in-fighting, even between Gracie Barra and Gracie Humaita - it's pretty nuts... Now that I've opened up my own place I try to stay away from all the politics because it really doesn't help anyone.